A vigorous, revealing look at a forgotten—and confusing—chapter in American history, one that invites critical...
Contrarian account of a contrarian struggle, in some senses America’s first civil war.
If it’s mentioned at all in survey texts, the Whiskey Rebellion is usually seen as an effort on the part of simpleminded frontiersmen to keep Washington revenuers from taxing their corn mash, a sort of postcolonial Snuffy Smith. The rebellion was more complicated, as freelance journalist Hogeland shows; though plenty of roughshod and untutored frontier figures took up arms against the federal government, the movement to resist excise taxes that favored wealthy and large producers of booze over mom-and-pop operations was widely perceived as justifiable opposition to tyranny. Blame it on Alexander Hamilton; the first treasury secretary found it expedient to retire war debts owed to wealthy domestic creditors by levying charges of many kinds on states, communities and consumers. His financier ally, Robert Morris, benefited greatly from the repayment (plus interest, and lots of it) of the war debt; he also “controlled all real power in Congress, as well as the Continental Army” and was, by Hogeland’s account, a scammer and a scoundrel. After the revolution, Hamilton labored to bring the independent-minded western frontier—then extending not much further west than Pittsburgh—under the control of tax agents such as John Neville, who lived on a splendid estate staffed by slaves in the abolition-minded, poor Appalachians; a key moment in the rebellion of 1791 was the incineration of that fine estate by a grim army dressed in blackface, Indian garb and even women’s clothing. Led by an offbeat evangelist who experienced visions and believed in such strange ideas as profit-sharing and a progressive income tax, the rebellion was quickly suppressed by federal troops at George Washington’s order—though, as Hogeland notes, Washington himself took to making whiskey soon afterward, even as his successor, Thomas Jefferson, repealed the hated whiskey tax.
A vigorous, revealing look at a forgotten—and confusing—chapter in American history, one that invites critical reconsideration of a founding father or two.Pub Date: April 25, 2006
ISBN: 0-7432-5490-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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