A fascinating, well-told story by an author fully committed to his subject. Egan’s impeccable research, uncomplicated...
The story of Thomas Meagher (1823-1867), an Irishman radicalized by the famine who became a hero on three continents.
New York Times columnist Egan (Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis, 2012, etc.), winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, could have written multiple books about Meagher’s broad successes. He was a natural-born orator, and his gift encouraged his fellow Irish in hopes of freedom sooner, rather than “in time,” as per the Great Liberator, Daniel O’Connell. The author imparts the desperation of the starving families while pointing to the many wealthy Catholics and Protestants who worked to achieve liberty. During the Great Famine, England exported 1.5 billion pounds of grain as well as more beef than any other colony, while millions starved without the blighted potatoes that sustained them. After a fiery speech in Conciliation Hall and a betrayal by John Balfe, the English arrested Meagher and a handful of others for speaking out. Meagher was sent to Tasmania, and while he was not put into forced labor, he had limited contact with his fellow Irish. Discovering that the traitor Balfe had been given a land grant, he sent an anonymous series of letters to the press, exposing his perfidy. Eventually, with help from his wealthy father, he escaped. His reputation preceded him, and his welcome in America was riotous. His leadership and oration made him a great recruiter of his fellow countrymen during the Civil War. A different side of the Civil War emerges as the author describes the frustrations of war under Gen. George McClellan and the devotion of Meagher’s men. Exhausted after Chancellorsville, Meagher resigned and moved to Montana with his wife, where he fought yet again against a rabid vigilance committee.
A fascinating, well-told story by an author fully committed to his subject. Egan’s impeccable research, uncomplicated readability, and flowing narrative reflect his deep knowledge of a difficult and complex man.Pub Date: March 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-544-27288-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An alternately nostalgic, entertaining, and annoying portrait of what Joselit sees as the domestication, commercialization, and sentimentalization of American Jewish culture. Joselit (Our Gang, not reviewed) has combed an array of Jewish newspapers, memoirs, synagogue bulletins, and other documents to create a vast assemblage of facts about the transformation of Jewish ritual and religion in America. She details the evolution of the simple Jewish marriage ceremony into a copiously catered, highly theatrical ``affair''; the growth of Jewish consumer culture, from Bible dolls to bar mitzvah suits to designer Chanukah menorahs; and the devolution of the observance of kashruth into a yen for gefilte fish. The rise and fall of confirmation as an egalitarian alternative to the bar mitzvah, the development of advertising targeted to a Jewish market (exemplified by the ubiquitous Maxwell House Passover haggadah)—all are related in engaging detail. But Joselit's analysis is thin (she speaks of the ``promise of America'' and the clash between individualist American culture and community-based Jewish culture), leaving readers with a sense of nostalgia for the past, a patronizing attitude toward an era when divorce was referred to as a ``marital mishap,'' and irritation at the glib tone with which Joselit refers to intermarriage as ``the ultimate romantic escapade.'' In the end, a distasteful, homogenized portrait emerges of a Jewish community consisting of what Joselit calls the ``folk'' (a cultural grouping, not a class one) who think religion can be lively and fun, and a bunch of crabby rabbis (the ``elite'') who rant and rail over their materialism and abandonment of tradition. It is a spiritually bereft culture, in which the deli is visited more regularly than the synagogue and Chanukah is less a celebration of freedom than, as one woman put it in 1950, a ``major competitive winter sport.'' It was a culture that led to both higher rates of intermarriage and a search for spiritual renewal in the post-50s decades. Unfortunately, Joselit ends her tale too soon.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-8090-2757-7
Page Count: 356
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
An unflinching portrait of the times.
Novelist Litwak (Waiting for the News, not reviewed) pens an unsentimental WWII memoir that serves as a reality-check against the Spielbergian hyperbole and “Greatest Generation” nostalgia currently clouding our vision of that conflict.
When he was called up in 1943, 17-year-old University of Michigan freshman Litwak was disappointed by his medical corps assignment. “Medics carried no weapons,” he writes. “They were obliged to treat enemy wounded as well as their own. . . . I had imagined myself an armed, vengeful warrior.” By the end of this terse, vivid, occasionally funny, quietly ironic, often brutal narrative, young Leo has matured under considerable duress beyond this naïve view of war and his place in it. From his encounters with anti-Semitic officers during basic training in South Carolina through his first experiences with dead and dying buddies to his final weeks as part of the American force occupying the defeated Saxon town of Grossdorf, Litwak learns one lesson after another about death, cruelty, vengeance, survival, and moral ambiguity. His teachers include fellow soldiers like Maurice Sully (who sings about oral sex and loots the houses of fleeing German civilians) and Roy Jones (a farm boy who takes pleasure in assassinating German POWs), as well as small-time hustlers, enslaved Slavic workers, drunken Russian soldiers, starving German women trading sex for provisions, and other characters indelibly drawn in stripped-down prose. Love and altruism only occasionally brighten this dark picture. After V-E Day, Leo stops briefly in Paris on a futile mission to rekindle a “romance” with a prostitute he’d met there, then eventually goes home. “I wanted to strip away any evidence of war,” he realizes. “I didn’t ever again want to hear rockets or be summoned to give aid. I didn’t ever again want to dig in or see anyone wounded or suffer anyone’s dying. . . . Let that all be in the past, cleansed by recollection.”
An unflinching portrait of the times.Pub Date: May 8, 2001
ISBN: 1-56512-305-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2001
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