By a master storyteller and leading Civil War historian, the story of Lee's greatest victory, gained in four days of fighting in May 1863. Sears (Landscape Turned Red, 1983, etc.) draws fresh life from combatants' eyewitness accounts, in diaries, memoirs, letters, and regimental histories. He traces the origins of the battle of Chancellorsville to a cabal of Union officers that forced the loser of Fredericksburg, Ambrose Burnside, to resign as commander of the Army of the Potomac. Sears credits Burnside's successor, ``Fighting Joe'' Hooker, with transforming a poorly supplied and ill-paid army marked by low morale and poor discipline into a tougher, more professional army within two months. Hooker promised President Lincoln that his newly shaped-up army would attack Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia soon and end the war. Sears finds Hooker's plans to attack Lee in Virginia sound in concept but poor in execution. Lee, with only half the number of Union troops, violated an old military axiom by splitting his army, using Stonewall Jackson to move a strong assault force around enemy lines to strike the Union's sleepy right flank. Jackson's surprise assault was the key to a brilliant but costly victory; in the confusion Jackson was mortally wounded by his own troops. Sears argues that incompetent corps commanders let Hooker down by failing to execute orders properly, and that Hooker was also compromised by poor intelligence and by a cavalry general who failed in his mission to cut off Lee's supply train. Lee's tactics finally forced the Union troops to abandon the field. Sears believes that, ironically, Lee's victory at Chancellorsville emboldened him to invade Pennsylvania, which resulted in his bloody defeat at Gettysburg. Another definitive book by the skilled Sears—a must for Civil War students and buffs. (16 b&w photos, not seen) (History Book Club main selection)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-395-64317-2
Page Count: 588
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1996
Not just an inventory of gizmos and whatsits, this is a responsible attempt by two British archaeologists (Centuries of Darkness, not reviewed) to construct an overview of science and technology in various cultures before 1492. The book, they say, has ``one simple message: Our ancestors, however long ago they may have lived and whatever part of the globe they may have occupied, were no idiots.'' Among the 12 chapter headings are Medicine (``The medical writings of Cornelius Celsus, who lived under the Emperor Tiberius...include a detailed description of a cataract operation''); Transportation (more than 2,000 years ago the Chinese ``were making miniature hot-air balloons from empty eggshells''); and Sex Life (``Ancient Greek dildos were often made to measure from bread''). With drawings and photographs. (Quality Paperback Book Club selection)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-345-36476-7
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994
The story of V†clav Havel bears retelling in almost any form- -which is just as well, since his official biographer, a fellow dissident in the long struggle to free their country from communism, has taken full advantage of poetic license to cast her subject as the protagonist of a morality play. (In a laconic foreword, Havel impishly informs readers that the author's notably idolatrous view is her own and he ``can hardly judge to what extent it is true.'') While Kriseov†, a former journalist, might also have difficultly distinguishing between her discontinuous, deadly earnest narrative's facts and fancies at this remove, she's in arguably good company. Havel's own self-portrait, Disturbing the Peace (1990), and Summer Meditations (1992) are equally elusive, if appreciably more worldly-wise, on the score of reality. At any rate, the author offers a hit-or-miss account of her hero's odyssey, which stops short with his 1989 election as chief executive of a united Czechoslovakia in the wake of the so-called Velvet Revolution. A son of the Bohemian bourgeoisie, Havel became a playwright while serving an obligatory hitch in the armed forces. With frequent asides on writers (Beckett, Ionesco, Kafka, et al.) and others who influenced him, Kriseov† tracks Havel's subsequent involvement in little-theater productions of his work that, among other things, satirized the dehumanization of individual relationships, language, and social institutions. Havel's literary output and political opinions earned him no favor with authorities either before or after the Prague spring of 1968. Throughout the Iron Curtain era, then, he paid the dissenter's stiff price- -censorship, harassment, and imprisonment. In time, however, the repressive regime was toppled, sending Havel from a cell to a palace in what the author clearly believes is a fairy-tale triumph of good over evil. Haphazard hagiography that portrays Havel as a latter-day good King Wenceslaus. (Photographs—16 pp.—not seen)
Pub Date: Sept. 24, 1993
ISBN: 0-312-10327-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1993
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