A staggering work of research by a masterly historian.
From “Old Fuss and Feathers” Winfield Scott to Ulysses S. Grant, the succession of Northern generals during the Civil War receives a thorough scouring in this massive, elegant study.
Eminent Civil War historian Sears (Gettysburg, 2004, etc.) sifts through the archives to track how the Army of President Abraham Lincoln took some years and numerous setbacks finally to get its act together until final victory. The initial period before and after the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter was marked by indecision and unpreparedness on the part of the new administration as well as that of the Union Army, led by the aging Mexican-American War hero Scott. His initial alarming memorandum to appease the secessionists by giving up Sumter and Fort Pickens did not bode well for smooth relations with the new president. As Scott was too obese and infirm to lead battle, Irvin McDowell led the attack at Bull Run, which ended in a Union rout and caused Scott to be replaced by the “stubbornly uncooperative” George McClellan. The Union Army gained its new name, Army of the Potomac, and the officers were reorganized. However, McClellan’s rocky stint lasted only until November 1862, after the dilatory, stagnant move toward Richmond and the bloody Battle of Antietam, which prompted Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, derided arrogantly by McClellan. Exasperated by McClellan’s “over-cautiousness,” Lincoln subsequently endured the “darkling doldrums” of generals John Pope, Ambrose Burnside, and Joseph Hooker before finding a fighting match in George Meade and U.S. Grant. Indeed, writes Sears, “the high command that closed the war in April 1865 was a world apart from the high command that opened the war.” The author wades through dense research not only chronicling the military maneuvers of the war, but also the intensive political intrigues surrounding the high command. Sears lists 20 generals who were “dead and gone serving the Army of the Potomac” by the time of the surrender at Appomattox.
A staggering work of research by a masterly historian.Pub Date: April 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-618-42825-0
Page Count: 912
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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
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