Diverse character studies that give a broad view of the sweeping economic revolutions of the era.
Popular history of the economy of the Civil War era, a transformative time on the commercial/financial as much as the military fronts.
The usual picture of homefront conditions during the Civil War is a grim time of illness, cold, and hunger. From the Southern side, that’s not off the mark, but as Wert (A Glorious Army: Robert E. Lee’s Triumph, 1862-1863, 2011, etc.) records, the Northern economy boomed, the result of decades of investment and industrialization during which the South relied on slave-based agriculture. So it was that “private gunmakers in just one Connecticut county produced more firearms than gunsmiths in the entire slaveholding South,” good cause for William Tecumseh Sherman to warn secessionists that they would be overwhelmed by “one of the most powerful, ingeniously mechanical and determined people on earth.” The economic strength of the North was fueled by inventors, financiers, and industrialists, nearly 20 of whom Wert profiles here. Readers will have heard of many of them, if only because their names endure in companies that have descended from them: John Deere, for instance, whose Illinois blacksmith shop took advantage of immigrant labor and the nearby Mississippi River to mass-produce a plow that, along with Cyrus McCormick’s reaper, enabled large-scale agriculture. Other familiar names carry stories that are sometimes more puzzling than inspirational: Gail Borden, for example, who tried to promote a “meat biscuit” in the place of Army rations but failed abjectly, since it “was simply not palatable,” only to thrive by selling condensed milk to the federal commissary. Wert glances over some key moments: for instance, the abolitionist sympathies of the Californians who would become transcontinental railroad barons, thwarting Jefferson Davis’ push to take that railroad first across the South. Still, he turns up some fine nuggets, such as repeating-rifle inventor Christopher Spencer’s failure to keep his fortune, consoling himself with the deathbed thought that “the best I can say is I don’t think I am leaving any enemies.”
Diverse character studies that give a broad view of the sweeping economic revolutions of the era.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-306-82512-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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