Here Schama (Citizens, 1989, etc.; History/Harvard) compellingly re-creates two historic deaths, both linked to the Parkman dynasty of Boston, by these contrasting re-creations and explores "the teasing gap separating a lived event and its subsequent narration." The first narrative is of the death of General James Wolfe on the Plains of Abraham during the historic Battle of Quebec. Relying on much primary source material, Schama tersely narrates the death of Wolfe from three perspectives; that of an eyewitness, that of fashionable painter Benjamin West (whose portrayal of Wolfe's death was less influenced by a concern for verisimilitude than by a desire to emulate classical models), and that of historian Francis Parkman (who, the author shows, tended to invest Wolfe with his own nervous sensibility and high-strung qualities). Then comes the story of a more obscure death — the alleged murder of George Parkman, uncle of the historian, at the hands of George Parkman's friend and debtor, George Webster. Here, forsaking reliance on historical documentation for a looser, more novelistic approach, Schama tells how Parkman hounded the hapless Webster over some debts, how Parkman disappeared, and how a man who detested Webster discovered the grisly remains of a corpse in the cellar of the medical school in which Webster taught. The agonizing tale of the trial, conviction, and execution of Webster reveals how the judicial process compelled acceptance of one of the competing versions of the truth. Schama laces together the two narratives with an insightful meditation on the essential elusiveness of historical truth and on the need for creative invention in historical scholarship and writing. An imaginative, spellbinding work that reminds us that history is more art than science.
Pub Date: May 13, 1991
ISBN: 0679736131
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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