A curious portrait of a celebrity nonentity caught up in the throes of history.
Martelle (The Admiral and the Ambassador: One Man’s Obsessive Search for the Body of John Paul Jones, 2014, etc.) explores the troubled life of a key yet little-known character in the Abraham Lincoln assassination drama.
A journeyman journalist and author whose historical interests range far and wide, the author here conjures the spirit of an English-born hatter and Union soldier, Thomas “Boston” Corbett, who thanked Providence for guiding his fatal shot to the neck of John Wilkes Booth after the manhunt in April 1865. As a young apprentice plying his trade in Manhattan, Corbett was most likely exposed to the mercury-based compounds used in the felt at the time, which might explain some of the classic symptoms of paranoia he later exhibited (and which gave rise to the expression “mad as a hatter”). After the death of his young wife and a descent into heavy drinking, Corbett was redeemed by temperance Christians and moved to Boston to become a proselytizer and street preacher for the Methodist Church. He followed a bizarre self-castration with his baptism in the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1858, when he took the first name Boston. A fervent abolitionist, Corbett signed up for New York’s 12th Regiment in 1861, then later joined the 16th New York Cavalry, based in northern Virginia, an important spot in the manhunt for Lincoln’s assassin. (Unfortunately, there is no map to elucidate the geography of the manhunt.) At the right place at the right time, Corbett shot Booth through the slats of the tobacco shed where the assassin was hiding, apparently drawing his rifle to fire at the Union soldiers. Corbett won fame rather than censure for the shooting, allowing him a small slice of the reward and an Army pension. He eventually slipped into delusional behavior, and his death is shrouded in mystery.
A curious portrait of a celebrity nonentity caught up in the throes of history.Pub Date: April 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-61373-018-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2015
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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