There are few more essential books for Civil War buffs and professional historians alike. A welcome, valuable addition to...
Firsthand accounts of the bloodletting whose 150th anniversary we are about to commemorate, some of which might have saved later historians embarrassment.
In 1883, only 20 years after Gettysburg, the editors of The Century magazine commissioned a comprehensive series of articles from senior officers on both sides of the conflict, documenting great events and more modest episodes alike. For the next four years, contributions poured in, and The Century experienced a huge bump in circulation. Here, political historian Holzer (Lincoln: President-Elect, 2008, etc.) serves up a comparatively compact selection, whittling the original down to a quarter and enlisting leading historians—James McPherson, Joan Waugh, Craig Symonds and others—to provide contextual introductions and notes. The result is a model of scholarship and historical editing—though, as is proper, its greatest value is in presenting those original views. Confederate Gen. Stephen D. Lee writes of the war’s stage-setting process. At the first Confederate Congress in Montgomery, Ala., many believed first that there would be no war; writes Lee, “The expectation of ‘peaceable secession’ was the delusion that precipitated matters in the South.” One of Lee’s counterparts, Jacob D. Cox, writes that the North was scarcely better prepared, though rumors of war had long been rumbling: “There had for many years been no money appropriated to buy military material or even to protect the little the State had.” After the disaster at Bull Run—ably recounted by victorious Confederate generals Beauregard and Johnston—the North was better equipped and would forever remain so. Every page here is fascinating, but historians should note the firsthand accounts of Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg, which has been second-guessed ever since, but which seems all but inevitable from a you-are-there perspective. The answer to why Robert E. Lee appeared at Appomattox in a brand-new uniform, which has puzzled some historians, is also revealed. Many of the Confederate writers are sharply critical of the political conduct of the South, condemning Jefferson Davis for, in the words of one, “drift[ing], from the beginning to the end of the war.” Some Union writers, for their parts, are scarcely more complimentary of their leadership.
There are few more essential books for Civil War buffs and professional historians alike. A welcome, valuable addition to the vast library devoted to the conflict.Pub Date: April 5, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-679-64364-7
Page Count: 1280
Publisher: Modern Library
Review Posted Online: Dec. 29, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
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
PERSPECTIVES
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