bookshelf

THE GATHERING OF ZION

Name: THE GATHERING OF ZION
Author: Wallace Stegner
ISBN: 0803292139

THE STORY OF THE MORMON TRAIL

by Wallace Stegner ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1964

bookshelf

The American West was settled by many hardy types, pioneers in search of freer land, economic betterment, or adventure; but it was only the Mormons who set out with the promise of eternal life. The Saints who formed the Gathering of Zion in the faith of Joseph Smith and the leadership of Brigham Young began a permanent hegira to the West along the now symbolic Mormon Trail. Forced by Gentile hostilities to leave their site at Nauvoo, Illinois, the migrant flood began in 1845 and the "Twelve Apostles" reached the Great Salt Lake in '47, to be followed over the next twenty years by waves of American and European converts. Soon two-way traffic flowed over the trail—Mormon missionaries returned to the East, passing their Brothers en route to the "New Jerusalem." Written by a non-Mormon, this documented history of the Trail is the story of individual pioneers taken from their letters, journals and reminiscences. Concerned with how the West—not how the Faith—was won, the author manages to reconstruct another historical chapter of the American Frontier story— undistinguished but interesting in its place.

Pub Date: June 15, 1964

ISBN: 0803292139

Page Count: 372

Publisher: McGraw-Hill

Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1964

Categories:

HISTORY | UNITED STATES | GENERAL HISTORY

- BOOK REVIEW
ON TEACHING AND WRITING FICTION
by Wallace Stegner

- BOOK REVIEW
THE UNEASY CHAIR
by Wallace Stegner

- BOOK REVIEW
MARKING THE SPARROW'S FALL
by Wallace Stegner

bookshelf

ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN

by Bob Woodward & Carl Bernstein ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 18, 1974

bookshelf

Bernstein and Woodward, the two Washington Post journalists who broke the Big Story, tell how they did it by old fashioned seat-of-the-pants reporting — in other words, lots of intuition and a thick stack of phone numbers. They've saved a few scoops for the occasion, the biggest being the name of their early inside source, the "sacrificial lamb" H**h Sl**n. But Washingtonians who talked will be most surprised by the admission that their rumored contacts in the FBI and elsewhere never existed; many who were telephoned for "confirmation" were revealing more than they realized. The real drama, and there's plenty of it, lies in the private-eye tactics employed by Bernstein and Woodward (they refer to themselves in the third person, strictly on a last name basis). The centerpiece of their own covert operation was an unnamed high government source they call Deep Throat, with whom Woodward arranged secret meetings by positioning the potted palm on his balcony and through codes scribbled in his morning newspaper. Woodward's wee hours meetings with Deep Throat in an underground parking garage are sheer cinema: we can just see Robert Redford (it has to be Robert Redford) watching warily for muggers and stubbing out endless cigarettes while Deep Throat spills the inside dope about the plumbers. Then too, they amass enough seamy detail to fascinate even the most avid Watergate wallower — what a drunken and abusive Mitchell threatened to do to Post publisher Katherine Graham's tit, and more on the Segretti connection — including the activities of a USC campus political group known as the Ratfuckers whose former members served as a recruiting pool for the Nixon White House. As the scandal goes public and out of their hands Bernstein and Woodward seem as stunned as the rest of us at where their search for the "head ratfucker" has led. You have to agree with what their City Editor Barry Sussman realized way back in the beginning — "We've never had a story like this. Just never."

Pub Date: June 18, 1974

ISBN: 0671894412

Page Count: 372

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1974

Categories:

- BOOK REVIEW
PERIL
by Bob Woodward & Robert Costa

- BOOK REVIEW
RAGE
by Bob Woodward

- BOOK REVIEW
FEAR
by Bob Woodward

bookshelf

A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

by Howard Zinn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1979

bookshelf

For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.