GETTYSBURG

Name: GETTYSBURG
Author: Stephen W. Sears
ISBN: 0-395-86761-4

by Stephen W. Sears ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 30, 2003

A fine study, detailed and challenging, that complements such popular accounts of the battle as Bruce Catton’s Glory Road...

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An accomplished historian of the Civil War (Controversies and Commanders, 1999, etc.) offers a blow-by-blow account of the three-day Battle of Gettysburg and its effects on the course of the conflict.

Dwight Eisenhower once recalled that at West Point he and his classmates were made to memorize the order of battle at Gettysburg hour by hour and quizzed on which unit faced which at any given moment in the combat. “If this was military history,” he wrote, “I wanted no part of it.” Had he had this as a text, Ike might have enjoyed the exercise a little more, for though Sears gives that information in lashings, he does so with a storyteller’s skill and a strategist’s appreciation for the changing tides of battle. He takes time getting to the first shot at Seminary Ridge, recapping the events that led to Robert E. Lee’s decision to bring his troops into northern territory (with the idea, Sears writes, of drawing the Union army away from Richmond) and that led Lee to disregard James Longstreet’s warning that the topography favored the Yankee enemy. Once at Gettysburg, however, Sears’s account is full of grapeshot and canister, blending a sometimes near-documentary account of minute portions of the battle with broader-ranging discussion of its conduct overall. This mix yields particularly satisfying results when it is applied to set pieces such as the Union defense of Little Round Top and George Pickett’s ill-fated Grand Charge, to which Sears brings sophisticated observations that well-versed students of warfare will appreciate but that may well be lost on less knowledgeable readers; among these is his account of Joshua Chamberlain’s famed right-wheel maneuver on Little Round Top and his analysis of Johnson Pettigrew’s arrangement of his brigades on the Confederate battle line in a compact deployment by which “colonels could keep better control of their men in the din of battle, and could reinforce the front line with their own second line rather than having to depend on some other commander for support.”

A fine study, detailed and challenging, that complements such popular accounts of the battle as Bruce Catton’s Glory Road and Shelby Foote’s The Stars in Their Courses.

Pub Date: June 30, 2003

ISBN: 0-395-86761-4

Page Count: 640

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003

Categories:

HISTORY | UNITED STATES | GENERAL HISTORY

- BOOK REVIEW
LINCOLN'S LIEUTENANTS
by Stephen W. Sears

- BOOK REVIEW
CONTROVERSIES AND COMMANDERS
by Stephen W. Sears

- BOOK REVIEW
CHANCELLORSVILLE
by Stephen W. Sears

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FAMILY

by Ian Frazier ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 28, 1994

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The grand sweep of American history is writ small in this family history/memoir by humorist Frazier (Great Plains, 1989, etc.). Frazier undertook this effort after his parents died in the late 1980s, to ``find a meaning that would defeat death.'' But his project seems more complicated and self-conscious, if not pretentious: an attempt to somehow reclaim American history for himself, a white Protestant. His preoccupation with his own religious doubt, contrasted with the firm faith of his ancestors- -whether German Reformed, Old School Presbyterian, or, like his great-great-grandfather Simeon Frazier, a member of the antiauthoritarian Disciples of Christ—culminates in a strange, reductionist review of American history as an expression of the decline of Protestant faith. More broadly, Frazier shares indiscriminately with us every detail he has been able to root out: from the momentous (the arrival of Thomas Benedict on these shores in 1638 and his descendant Platt Benedict's founding of Norwalk, Ohio) to the trivial (his great-great-uncle Charles's first attempt at fly-fishing and his grandmother's showing family pictures to Tennessee Williams in Key West). The quantity of information that could have rendered full-blooded portraits of long-ago generations is lacking; the lengthy catalogs often offered (trite entries from a great-grandfather's school diary, quotations from his parents' rather ordinary love letters) seem like fillers. The histories of the Fraziers, Wickhams, Benedicts, and Hurshes do follow the outlines of American history: the push west (all his relatives ended up in Ohio); the Civil War (Norwalk was a stop on the underground railroad); industrialization (his father became a chemist for Sohio). But Frazier's prose is flat as a prairie and his humor dry as stone. Only at the end, in interviews with two colorful relatives, and with the description of the deaths of his teenage brother Fritz from leukemia and of his parents, does the tale reach emotional heights. An object lesson in the pitfalls of writing a family history for anyone other than your family. (First printing of 50,000; $50,000 ad/promo; author tour)

Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1994

ISBN: 0-374-15319-1

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1994

Categories:

GENERAL HISTORY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY

- BOOK REVIEW
PARADISE BRONX
by Ian Frazier

- BOOK REVIEW
CRANIAL FRACKING
by Ian Frazier

- BOOK REVIEW
HOGS WILD
by Ian Frazier

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THE CARTOON HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSE II

VOLS. 8-13, FROM THE SPRINGTIME OF CHINA TO THE FALL OF ROME

by Larry Gonick ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 1994

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Imagine a collaboration between Arnold Toynbee and R. Crumb and you get a pretty good idea of Gonick's clever and ambitious comic book series. This volume should not be taken as some kind of Mel Brooksish joke. Gonick does his research and interprets his sources with scholarly care. Inspired by the educational comic books of Latin American artist RIUS, Gonick makes world history a blast— literally, with his predilection for onomatopoeic word balloons. In this second collection—the last left us with Alexander the Great schlepping toward Persia—Gonick takes us on a side tour through India and China. He integrates myth and history to establish the origins of sectarian conflict in India, and attends to migration patterns from the Middle East to China in order to explain the development of Buddhism and Confucianism. Dynamic intrigue and the threat of northern barbarians compete with periods of prolonged peace. This highly selective version of Chinese history, though full of diverting stories, will be a bit confusing to readers unfamiliar with the main players. Back in Rome, meanwhile, after the death of Alexander, the republic enters its period of glory, followed by the building of the empire. Problems of succession lead to lots of lurid anecdotes about perverse and insatiable emperors, violent entertainments, brutal conquests—all of which Gonick records with Mad-like irreverence. He equivocates, however, in telling the story of Jesus, ending up with an uneasy mix of canonical fact and outright heresy. His account of the historical rise of Christianity is superb and demonstrates an interesting parallel with China: In both cases alien cults from the edge of the empires eventually captured the capital cities. Gonick's humor is mostly visual and relies on the juxtaposition of comical images with his relatively sober text. Despite his lefty, multi-culty inclinations, Gonick maintains the high level of sophistication, skepticism, and just plain fun established by the first volume.