Revisionist study of one of the most signal defeats in the annals of America.
By Hatch’s (Glorious War: The Civil War Adventures of George Armstrong Custer, 2013, etc.) account, it is an enduring myth to think that Custer committed a mistake by splitting his forces and entering the field of battle on the grass of Little Bighorn in multiple columns. In previous engagements in the Civil War and Indian Wars, Custer had separated his command and lived to tell the tale, once at the Battle of the Washita River. Hatch does not add that at Washita it was mostly women and children who stood in Custer’s way, though the warriors managed to rub out one of those separated units, but his point stands: Viewing the lay of the land and where he thought his enemies were and how they would react, Custer was rightly engaging in a strategy that he had proven in past battles. In a library that includes work by such fine writers as Nathaniel Philbrick and Evan S. Connell, Hatch’s book is no competition in literary terms; the prose sags and strains (“the powers that be did not have to work too hard to demonize the Sioux and Cheyenne in the eyes of the average cavalryman”). As a purely military account that draws heavily on that library, though, it has its merits. Hatch does a good job of describing firearms, tactics, the minutiae of cavalry mounts and the terrible fury of a battle that might have been won had Marcus Reno's and Frederick Benteen’s columns arrived. To his detriment, though, Hatch goes on too long about “brotherhood under fire,” a sentiment the victorious Indians no doubt felt themselves. The author’s nonironic contrasting of the “civilized world” with theirs is something at home in Custer’s era but not in our own.
Custer completists will want to have a look, but there are many better books on the subject.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-05102-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HISTORICAL & MILITARY | MILITARY | HISTORY
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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