Marvel is both credited with and accused of writing revisionist history, and this final volume is in keeping with its...
Acclaimed historian Marvel (The Great Task Remaining: The Third Year of Lincoln’s War, 2010, etc.) delivers the final volume of his finely written, minutely researched four-part history of the Civil War.
The author’s subject is the final year of the war, thus building on his prior three volumes, which assess and often challenge the generally accepted portrait of America’s most divisive conflict. Marvel begins in the spring of 1864, with a nation so bogged down in a bloody, mismanaged war that many legitimately despaired of its end. Readers’ knowledge that the conflict would be resolved in a bloody burst of energy nearly 12 months later causes this inauspicious start of the 1864 campaign to be all the more remarkable. The author has the historian’s gift of assimilating facts and extrapolating stories. Compelling narratives emerge from the study of Northern draft protocols, the appalling conditions of the Confederate Andersonville POW camp and its Union counterparts and the creaking machinery of a war department so burdened by bureaucracy that its soldiers and their dependents were left waiting months—even years—for their back pay. Marvel culls evidence from a wide variety of sources, from the lowliest private’s letters to his sweetheart to Gen. Grant’s communiqués with Lincoln. It is this breadth of perspectives, both personal and contextual, that differentiates this chronicle from the many dry recitations of battles and their attendant losses that characterize a particular genre of Civil War history.
Marvel is both credited with and accused of writing revisionist history, and this final volume is in keeping with its predecessors in both tone and direction. It aptly concludes the author’s extensive effort to elucidate the errors of those powerful men who began the Civil War and quickly found themselves trapped by their own creation, forced to see it through to a merciless end.Pub Date: Nov. 16, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-547-42806-2
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2011
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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