The Confederate cavalry commander, as conspicuous for his racism as for his military prowess, receives a biography that emphasizes his reprehensible exploits as slave trader and founding father of the Ku Klux Klan. Robert E. Lee supposedly called Forrest ``the most extraordinary man the Civil War produced.'' But Chicago Tribune newsman Hurst offers the first recent portrait that pays as much attention to Forrest's distasteful activities before and after the war as to his undeniable martial genius. Better written than Brian Steel Wills's A Battle from the Start (1992), this new book spends less time on Forrest's extraordinary career as a soldier—he was the only man on either side who went from private to lieutenant general—and gives equal weight to his rise from raw frontier poverty to self-made wealth in land and slaves, his prewar civic activities as a Memphis alderman, and his postwar career as an icon of the unreconstructed South. But the good news about Hurst's work- -his reluctance to substitute speculation for fact in the name of psychobiography—is also the bad news: The reader is left wondering about the sources of Forrest's undeniable penchant for personal violence. What other general was even reported to have killed 30 enemy soldiers in hand-to-hand combat, in addition to shooting his own men caught running from battle? Hurst's hands-off attitude also results in an absence of strong conclusions about Forrest's conduct when the evidence is conflicting (did Forrest encourage or prevent the notorious massacre of Union, particularly black, soldiers at Fort Pillow? Hurst thinks he may have done both). Readers wanting military history should pass over both recent biographies for Edwin Bearss's Forrest at Brice's Cross Roads (1991). Hurst's is the best all-around recent life of Forrest, but we still await a truly insightful study of this complex man. Since Richard Ellmann is dead and Walter Jackson Bate is retired, how about it, Stephen Sears?
Pub Date: June 6, 1993
ISBN: 0-394-55189-3
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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