An absorbing memoir of the battles of Seven Days, Second Manassas, Fredericksburg, Gettysburg, and Chickamauga. Young Fletcher served with the famed Hood's Texans and Eighth Texas Cavalry; twice wounded, he helped harass Sherman's rear guard during the ``march to the sea.'' Born on the eastern Texas/western Louisiana frontier, he comes across in his writings as an intelligent, resourceful, common-sense leader who displayed courage and independence. Fletcher also proves to be an engaging man: He seems to have never felt animosity toward his Yankee foes, and he built a hospital in 1897 to thank the compassionate Catholic nuns who saved his leg from amputation during the war, though he was criticized for it by fellow Protestants. Poor and short on formal education, he was an avid reader who managed a successful lumber business in the depressed Reconstruction South. Fletcher describes volunteering for risky assignments where he could be on his own: as an advance scout probing for military intelligence, a courier in the midst of battle, a master forager acquiring vital food supplies, livestock, clothing, and whiskey from farmers or townspeople in his army's path. He relates his capture, his hardships as a prisoner of war, his daring escape, and his trying journey back to Texas after Lee's surrender. Valuable for its account of the war, Fletcher's narrative has an interesting history of its own: Originally published in 1907, almost all copies were destroyed in a 1908 fire; but Civil War historians found one in the Library of Congress, and Margaret Mitchell claimed the book was her single most valuable resource in researching Gone with the Wind. An informal and impressionistic account of some Civil War incidents as seen from the ranks; ghostly memories from a man of character.
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-525-93992-X
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1995
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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