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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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