by Thomas Fleming ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 9, 2007
A captivating account of a surprisingly little-known period that will educate even sophisticated readers.
Riveting history of the two years between Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown and the 1783 peace treaty that ended the Revolution.
Popular accounts assert that America won the war at Yorktown, but Washington didn’t think so, and historian Fleming (The Secret Trial of Robert E. Lee, 2006, etc.) demonstrates how right he was. As the general feared, the colonies celebrated and then, if possible, paid even less attention to his unpaid, shrinking, often mutinous army. Although Washington gets the credit, Yorktown was largely the work of our French allies, who fielded 29,000 soldiers alongside 9,000 Americans. Immediately after Yorktown, the French fleet (which made victory possible) sailed off with many of those troops, never to return. The remainder of the French announced they would spend the winter on the spot, despite Washington’s pleas to march south. The British still controlled Georgia and much of the Carolinas, meaning that a future peace treaty might retain them as British colonies. The same was true of New York, whose largest city was occupied by forces far outnumbering Washington’s. An aggressive British general might have made short work of that tattered army; luckily, no such commander remained in the colonies. Benedict Arnold (now a loyalist) yearned to do the job, but the British disliked him as much as the Americans did. Washington continued to earn his well-deserved immortality, exerting sheer charisma to keep together his dwindling army, which numbered perhaps 5,000 by 1783. Nathaniel Greene, the Revolution’s most brilliant general, reconquered most of the southern states with an army that rarely exceeded 1,000. In France, 75-year-old Ambassador Benjamin Franklin delivered a virtuoso performance, cajoling the government to allow the colonies to make peace (despite an earlier promise to stick with the French till the end) and charming British negotiators.
A captivating account of a surprisingly little-known period that will educate even sophisticated readers.Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-06-113910-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Smithsonian/Collins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2007
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
by Tom Clavin ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020
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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by Bob Drury & Tom Clavin
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