Railroad buffs will be delighted to note that the great project chronicled here is still unfolding, with the hotly contested...
Workmanlike history of the post–Civil War effort to lace the western United States with steel rails.
That war, writes lawyer-historian Borneman (Polk: The Man Who Transformed the Presidency and America, 2008, etc.), proved the efficacy of the railroads in moving men and supplies over great distances in short periods. One who learned that lesson was Union general William S. Rosecrans, who was outflanked thanks to a rebel railroad at Chickamauga, a potential catastrophe for the Yankees narrowly averted thanks to future president James A. Garfield. Rosecrans took the lesson to heart and, after the war, made his way to Southern California, where much of Borneman’s drama plays out as rival entrepreneurs attempted to build on the achievement of the completion, in 1869, of the first link of the transcontinental railroad by seeking routes across the western mountains that were relatively free of snow and ice. Other major players included Collis Huntington and Leland Stanford, who battled among other giants to determine which combination—the Kansas Pacific, the Santa Fe, the Central Pacific, etc.—would predominate. The author ably shows how their struggles over the decades are reflected in the current geography of the American West, explaining why Tucson, Albuquerque and other points became important precisely because the iron horse came galloping through. However, his account is rather colorless, certainly as compared to Stephen Fried’s vigorous Appetite for America (2010) or David Lavender’s older biography of Huntington, The Great Persuader (1970). Still, Borneman provides a solid business history, illustrating once again how the ones who make the real money in any given venture are usually the ones a step or two behind the true pioneers.
Railroad buffs will be delighted to note that the great project chronicled here is still unfolding, with the hotly contested corridor between Chicago and Los Angeles still “one of the most heavily traveled rail routes in North America.”Pub Date: Sept. 28, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6561-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2010
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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