A compelling reconstruction of a slave-revolt conspiracy in Adams County, Mississippi, during the spring and summer of 1861— and of the grisly events that ensued after the plot was exposed. The documentary trail of the ``Plan,'' as the abortive insurrection was called, is reed-thin: No official government report, newspaper article, pamphlet, or speech referred to it, and other contemporary records mentioned it only with tantalizing brevity. The longest extant record, an ``examination'' (no doubt coerced) of the plotters by local planters, is more helpful but still fragmentary. Nonetheless, from this slim evidence, Jordan (History and Afro-American Studies/Univ. of Mississippi; The White Man's Burden, 1973) presents a coherent narrative about a southern community perched on the lip of a volcano, astonished at proof of the slave unrest it had long dismissed but always feared. Jordan has fleshed out the testimony of the conspirators with the help of census records, diaries and letters, plantation papers, a WPA oral history given by an ex-slave, and even gravestones. Moreover, in ferreting out how the conspiracy formed and then unraveled, he never strains credulity, and he uses the incident to throw light on such matters as the role of religion among slaves, fear of abolitionist agitation, class divisions in white society, the grapevine by which slaves communicated, and male slaveholders' fears that their women would be raped. Jordan's tale evokes the furtive nocturnal whisperings of the conspirators, rumors running wild among slaveholders, and silence masking awful carnage (at least 40 slaves were hanged in the Natchez, Mississippi, region during the year of the plot). A historical jigsaw puzzle assembled with consummate skill by a thoughtful chronicler of the ``peculiar institution.'' (One halftone, two maps—not seen.)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-8071-1762-5
Page Count: 367
Publisher: Louisiana State Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1992
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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