A workmanlike biography of the amiable Union general that unconvincingly argues that Burnside's poor military reputation was largely an undeserved product of vicious military gossip and his own naive humility. Marvel, author of two scholarly Civil War military histories, points out that Burnside, exercising independent command over small numbers of soldiers, enjoyed some important successes—for instance, his spectacular 1862 victory on the North Carolina shore, which cut off Confederate trade routes, and his 1863 defense of Knoxville, which contributed to the destruction of Bragg's army at Chattanooga. Marvel also persuasively argues that McClellan in the Antietam campaign, and Halleck during the battles of Fredericksburg and Chickamauga, unfairly castigated Burnside for lethargy, confused him by making deliberately unclear orders, and unjustly used him as a scapegoat for Union defeats. Burnside's mistakes were probably no worse than those of other Union generals—his costly frontal assaults at Fredericksburg, for example, were reminiscent of Grant's unsuccessful charges at Vicksburg and Cold Harbor. Nonetheless, Marvel cannot absolve Burnside of responsibility for the Fredericksburg disaster or for the sanguinary 1864 debacle at the Crater. Moreover, Burnside showed considerable hamhandedness in his actions as chief of the Department of Ohio (for instance, his arrest of the notorious Copperhead Clement Vallandigham for making an anti-Government speech presented the Lincoln Administration with a potentially embarrassing dilemma that Lincoln cleverly averted by sending Vallandigham across Confederate lines into the South). Marvel succeeds in portraying Burnside as an honest, patriotic, and likable man who conscientiously did his best. He does not, however, succeed in altering history's judgment of Burnside as a modest man with much to be modest about. A well-researched and thorough look at one of the Civil War's major figures. (Twenty-nine illustrations; 13 maps.)
Pub Date: Nov. 25, 1991
ISBN: 0-8078-1983-2
Page Count: 450
Publisher: Univ. of North Carolina
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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