In other words, a second revolution instead of civil war. A well-made, always interesting study in the complex politics of...
A ripping tale of political intrigue, slander, mayhem, mudslinging, and powdered wigs.
Elect a Republican, thundered a Connecticut paper in the fall of 1800, and “the air will be rent with the cries of distress, the soil will be soaked with blood, and the nation black with crimes.” The Republicanism in question was that of Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr, who, writes Dunn (Humanities/Williams Coll.; Sister Revolutions, 1999), “offered voters a forceful platform and an aggressive agenda for change” in the place of the scandal-plagued Federalist administration of John Adams—resisting, for instance, the Sedition Act of 1798, an Ashcroftian piece of legislation “designed to smother opposition to the Federalist regime.” In the election of 1800, Jefferson and Burr earned an equal number of electoral votes ahead of Adams and Charles Pinckney. (In those days, each party fielded two candidates, with the winner named president and the runner-up vice president.) If the Federalists were able to extend the deadlock beyond the end of Adams’s term, then the country would be without a president, opening the way to a coup, or so Jefferson feared. The Federalists insisted that the Republicans’ victory would not have come about without the so-called three-quarters vote of the nation’s slaves. (See Garry Wills’s “Negro President,” 2003.) Indeed, Dunn observes, without that vote Adams would probably have won, but Adams instead blamed his loss on an earlier split with his erstwhile Federalist ally Alexander Hamilton. To secure victory, Jefferson had to win a second vote in Congress, which he accomplished with the defection of a single Federalist legislator. Whereas, in his upcoming Adams vs. Jefferson (see below), John Ferling sees this as a dark plot, Dunn views that outcome as a triumph of the political process, proof that the nation “was sufficiently unified in citizens’ commitment to the Constitution to permit organized opposition to the party in power.”
In other words, a second revolution instead of civil war. A well-made, always interesting study in the complex politics of the early Republic.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2004
ISBN: 0-618-13164-7
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004
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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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