A lively, lucid, and opinionated history, and his research supports his skepticism on some historical claims. The book...
An exhaustive biography of the most controversial figure in Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet.
Lincoln’s secretary of war, Edwin Stanton (1814-1869) has not lacked historical attention. Already an expert on the president and his era, historian Stahr (Seward: Lincoln’s Indispensable Man, 2012, etc.) seems reluctant to leave out any piece of his expansive research, but readers will forgive him. A self-made lawyer and pugnacious litigator, Stanton was well-known by the 1850s. While previous historians have turned up anti-slavery credentials in Stanton’s life, Stahr is skeptical. He notes that Stanton was on friendly terms with national figures on both sides but remained loyal to the Democratic Party, which tried to remain neutral. In December 1860, President James Buchanan appointed him attorney general. The author dismisses efforts to portray Stanton as a hard-liner, placing him among those who tried, tactfully, to discourage the dithering president from giving away the store. He left office in March 1861 and returned as secretary of war in January 1862, when he efficiently oversaw an immense military effort. He was overbearing, widely detested, and prone to arresting officials and harassing newspapers for endangering the Union. When Lincoln was shot, he took charge. He remained in office under Andrew Johnson, who tried to fire him for refusing to withdraw troops from the South. After Johnson’s failed impeachment trial in 1868, Stanton resigned, dying the following year, days after the new president, Ulysses Grant, appointed him to the Supreme Court. Readers may prefer to skim lengthy quotes from speeches and letters in this massive tome, but they will agree that Stanton lived in exciting times. The author provides a chronology and 8-page cast of characters to help keep names and dates straight.
A lively, lucid, and opinionated history, and his research supports his skepticism on some historical claims. The book should be Stanton’s definitive biography for some time to come.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4767-3930-4
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
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 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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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