Highly readable and especially useful as an overview of the early days of the U.S. Navy.
This early entry in the likely flood of books on the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812 focuses on the naval action.
Journalist and military historian Budiansky (The Bloody Shirt: Terror After Appomattox, 2008) notes that 1812 has as good a claim as any American war to the title “the forgotten war”—understandably, considering that it was at best a draw for the United States. In Jefferson’s administration, the government wasn’t sure it needed a navy at all; only the Barbary pirates seemed to justify keeping a few warships. Attitudes changed when Britain, embroiled in its war against Napoleon, began raiding American ships for sailors. A British ban on American merchants trading with France also gave the U.S. a casus belli. Britain’s refusal to concede these points resulted in open conflict, during which America was effectively forced to invent a navy from bare bones. Surprisingly, American sailors gave a good account of themselves in the early going. But William Jones, recruited to serve as Secretary of the Navy, recognized that single-ship duels were a losing strategy and issued orders to concentrate on commerce raiding. Consequently, for the majority of the war, American privateers and commerce raiders preyed on British ships, from the Pacific whaling grounds to the Irish Sea. Budiansky gives a solid account of all major naval actions and a fine picture of the personalities of the key figures—especially the proud American captains William Bainbridge, Stephen Decatur and Isaac Hull, and their British counterparts. The author also looks at the fate of American prisoners of war and at the larger political issues behind the war. The Treaty of Ghent brought the war to an end early in 1815, with Britain formally conceding none of the American demands. In practice, the impressments of American sailors ceased, ending the major bone of contention. Budiansky sees the result as an early example of asymmetric war, in which a weaker power prolongs the conflict by choosing to fight only on favorable terms until its opponent grows tired of the exercise.
Highly readable and especially useful as an overview of the early days of the U.S. Navy.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-27069-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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