A far-reaching, animated, and thoroughly enjoyable account of a family’s roots.
An Indiana-based author traces his family history in this genealogical study.
The title of this work is drawn from the Old Testament book of Isaiah, which begins: “Consider the rock from which you were hewn.” Reynolds (The Harmonious Echo, 2015) cleverly proceeds to do just that by first introducing his ancestors, the Butlers, as they sit around the table for Christmas dinner in 1929. He draws a sketch of each family member, beginning with Edwin Butler, a “handsome man,” “an outdoorsman,” and “photographer.” Beside him is his wife, Clarice, a “ ‘lady,’ in the proper old sense of the word.” After establishing a sense of intimacy, the author delves into the past to find the origins of the Butler name, which has a predominantly British heritage. Reynolds finds that his ancestors fought with the Scottish warrior William Wallace and “were part of the pageantry” when King James I of England was crowned. The author’s family tree reveals a bounty of captivating individuals, from an indentured servant who was sent to America to John Butland, who changed his name to Butler to avoid being associated with a family of the same name with a bad reputation, and the intrepid Winnie Butler, whose travels took her to Alaska, Norway, Rome, and beyond. Reynolds embroiders his family’s story into the more expansive fabric of history beautifully at times. For example, when portraying the youthful Clarice, he describes the fashions of the age: “When Clarice Hawkins was a young girl, the beau ideal of a young woman was the Gibson Girl, the creation of pen-and-ink artist Charles Dana Gibson.” This startlingly detailed background information allows readers to consider all of the family members as distinct products of their eras. The passionately written and painstakingly researched book contains a wealth of intriguing information and is richly illustrated using family photographs, lithographs, maps, and pedigree charts. Reynolds’ study should be a source of great interest and inspiration to readers keen on investigating their ancestors’ histories.
A far-reaching, animated, and thoroughly enjoyable account of a family’s roots.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5370-5208-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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