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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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