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
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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