by Winston Groom ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 4, 2006
Skillfully done, if not strictly necessary, matching the Monday morning quarterbacking of the practiced military historian...
War is hell—and it doesn’t get easier when gators and giant skeeters are involved, to say nothing of the shredding cannon and musket fire that punctuates Forrest Gump author Groom’s latest.
The last couple of publishing seasons seem to have belonged, for unknown reasons, to Andrew Jackson. Running a touch late, Groom continues the meme, offering up a study that doesn’t add much to recent works such as William Davis’s The Pirates Laffite (2005) and H.W. Brands’s Andrew Jackson (2005) save for good storytelling. Groom’s excursions into history have usually been provoked by discovering that some relative or another played a part, and this is no exception: A distant forebear turns out to have been commended by Jackson himself for bravery under fire, which is prologue and pretext enough to sustain a narrative that, while not particularly original, suffers only from a certain breeziness (“Andrew Jackson’s brand of warfare . . . was certainly no picnic for the Indians”; “I’m not proud that my ancestors owned slaves, but neither do I subscribe to the historic fallacy of assigning present-day ethics or morals to such a widely accepted practice by people who lived nearly two hundred years ago”). That narrative turns on a few key moments that are well known to historians but perhaps not to general readers, such as the privateer and putative pirate Jean Laffite’s rejecting British enticements to join them and instead throwing his lot in with Old Hickory, only to be betrayed by an ungrateful U.S. government. Groom finds much drama in all the unpleasantries, including some advanced by the noble heroes of New Orleans, as when Jackson orders the execution of supposed deserters and when one psychopathic Tennessean revels in slaughtering unfortunate redcoat sentries.
Skillfully done, if not strictly necessary, matching the Monday morning quarterbacking of the practiced military historian with good novelistic technique.Pub Date: May 4, 2006
ISBN: 1-4000-4436-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2006
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Tom Clavin ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020
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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