One of the “iconic moments in American history” is scrutinized in heroic detail.
Gardner’s books previously took on such iconic figures as Jesse James (Shot All to Hell: Jesse James, the Northfield Raid, and the Wild West’s Greatest Escape, 2014, etc.), Pat Garrett, and Billy the Kid. He writes that Theodore Roosevelt believed Spain was an Old World, “weak and decadent” relic, its occupation of Cuba outrageous. Roosevelt was assistant secretary of the Navy when the Spanish-American War broke out in 1898. Ambitious, intense, and energetic, he had been aching to be in a war—“nothing was going to keep him from the battlefield.” He resigned his position and a month later was off to Texas to join the First United States Volunteer Calvary as second in command, a 38-year-old lieutenant colonel. The Rough Riders, as newspapers called them, were a “ragtag regiment of Southwestern cowpunchers, Oklahoma Indians, Ivy League football stars, and champion polo players.” Roosevelt loved it: “I put myself in the way of things happening, and they happened.” They arrived by boat at Santiago in June. After experiencing some action, the penultimate event took place on July 1. Roosevelt, astride his horse, Little Texas, led his men up the hill yelling “Forward, March!” bullets from the Spanish soldiers’ rifles whistling by. One soldier wrote home: “I really believe firmly now, that they cannot kill him.” They took the hill but suffered casualties. The “splendid little war” lasted 10 weeks, and Roosevelt was elected governor of New York a year later. Numerous quotes from letters, journals, and memoirs bring this adventurous story to life. There are many books about this event, including Roosevelt’s own. Gardner’s short-paragraphed, fast-paced, and thoroughly researched addition will appeal to teens as well.
A rousing and robust story about the immortal charge and the significant role played in the war by Theodore Roosevelt, the only American president to be awarded the Medal of Honor.Pub Date: May 10, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-231208-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | UNITED STATES | MILITARY | HISTORY
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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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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