There probably have been too many books written about the Civil War—James Thurber once suggested that fines be levied on...
Historian Davis (Lincoln’s Men, 1999, etc.) offers a thoughtful social and political history of the Confederacy, without the usual emphasis on armies and battles.
The secession of the Confederate states from the US in 1861 was an odd sort of revolution. A small group of Southern autocrats and firebrands, who controlled political activity in their states using the forms and rhetoric of democracy, started the Civil War to preserve a hereditary aristocracy and a semi-feudal way of life. However, the strong sense of state identity and distrust of central authority that gave birth to the secessionist movement fatally undermined the Confederate government, and personal antagonisms between President Jefferson Davis and his many enemies added to the disunity. Moreover, the very process of waging the Civil War dramatically transformed Southern society. As the author explains, social chaos disrupted the legal system, Southern families experienced ever-worsening economic privation, and disloyalty to the Confederacy became commonplace. Rationing of commodities like cotton and salt represented government intrusion into private affairs that should have been antithetical to secessionists jealous of their property rights. Davis (Director of Programs/Virginia Center for Civil War Studies, Virginia Tech.) points out that by war's end military necessity compelled Confederate leaders to consider the conscription of black troops, which made nonsense of the racial justification for slavery. Ironically, he observes, the comprehensive ruin of the Civil War left Southern oligarchies intact at its end. Thus, ominously for Reconstruction, postwar Southern power remained in the hands of the few rather than the many.
There probably have been too many books written about the Civil War—James Thurber once suggested that fines be levied on authors of new ones. Davis, though, admirably sheds some new light on an old topic.Pub Date: April 7, 2002
ISBN: 0-684-86585-8
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2002
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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