An overlong but well-researched history that shows how the War of 1812 created America’s final separation from England.
Randall (Emeritus, History/Champlain Coll.; Ethan Allen: His Life and Times, 2014, etc.) elaborates on the war that shouldn’t have been fought and that no one won or lost.
The War of 1812 was the culmination of a decadeslong trade war between England and the United States. The British colonies existed only to supply raw materials and purchase British goods. The author begins in 1759, at the end of the Seven Years’ War. With the expulsion of the French from the Americas, settlers were ready to move west only to find England denying them access to lands and the fur trade. Regulations poured out of London under George III, determining what America could and could not trade. This was sufficient cause for a revolution, but the problems continued after independence. While Britain fought Napoleon and his forces in Europe, America determined to remain neutral. The British began taking American ships, claiming they were transporting war materiel and impressing English “deserters.” Randall’s lengthy background information causes the early narrative to plod, but it does help to expose the futility of the war. Britain actually repealed orders for embargoes and ship confiscations, but word didn’t arrive in Washington until a month after war was declared. Neither side was prepared, nor could they afford a war. With the fall of Napoleon, the need for impressing sailors, and the true cause of the war, had ended; America had little naval might to counter Britain’s vast armada. When it came down to the fighting, American military leaders were woefully inadequate. The British union with Tecumseh and his confederacy tilted the scales at first toward the English. Even major successes could not unite the states, especially in the anti-war Northeast. It was only the burning of Washington by the savage George Cockburn that united the country with a will to fight.
An overlong but well-researched history that shows how the War of 1812 created America’s final separation from England.Pub Date: June 27, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-11183-8
Page Count: 464
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017
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
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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