General William Tecumseh Sherman, perhaps the Union Army’s fiercest and most complicated soldier, wages war in these letters against the Confederacy, the press—and himself. Much of the general’s correspondence has been published previously, but this collection of 400 letters compiled by Simpson (History/Univ. of Arizona; The Reconstruction Presidents, 1998) and Berlin (who served on the editorial staff for The Papers of George Washington) restores some of the general’s more colorful comments and prints for the first time other letters in manuscript collections. His letters, by his own admission occasionally “imprudent,” are not only essential for all serious Civil War scholars, but also a delight for the general reader. Sherman constantly, reveals the manifold aspects of his personality: self-doubt, depression, conservatism, intelligence, cynicism, honesty, loyalty to country and comrades, love of family, and courage. The letters begin in late 1860, when Sherman, as head of the Louisiana State Seminary and Military Academy, warns that secession will be “a crime against civilization” that will unleash anarchy. Over the next four years, Sherman writes of the battles and campaigns that made him immortal. Along the way, he discusses race relations, Reconstruction, strategy, his growing partnership with Ulysses S. Grant, and his major bugaboo, the press (“the most contemptible race of men that exist”). He bewails how rumors of his insanity in late 1861 will disgrace the family name, then recovers his self-confidence by degrees in battle. He vents despair over the death of son Willie. Above all, we witness the evolution in his perception that the will of Southern civilians must be broken in order for the war to end (e.g., telling officials who protest resettlement of Atlanta’s civilians, “I myself have seen . . . women & children fleeing from your armies and desperadoes, hungry and with burning feet . . . . Now that war comes home to you, you feel very different”). A classic of Civil War literature worthy of a place beside the general’s own Memoirs.
Pub Date: April 19, 1999
ISBN: 0-8078-2440-2
Page Count: 976
Publisher: Univ. of North Carolina
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2000
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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