Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century. The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance. 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. 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.
Another winner from Tuchman-superbly readable, thoroughly researched.Įlie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
The result, as she moves on to describe Washington's 500-mile march from New York to Virginia and the Battle of Yorktown, is American history seen from the outside in-a fresh and ultimately dazzling perspective whose skillful arrangement is matched only by the sure scholarship on which it is based. Concentrating in the first half of her book almost exclusively on the European side of things, Tuchman describes three non-Americans-English Admiral Sir George Brydges Rodney, English General Lord Cornwallis, and French Admiral de Grasse-who were at least as influential on the final outcome of the Revolution as the Founding Fathers. In this case, the goal is the Battle of Yorktown, which Tuchman considers the decisive conclusion of events rooted as deeply in international problems in Europe as in relations between Great Britain and her colonies: the Dutch and English trade wars, hostilities between England and France, political conflicts in England, the condition of the English nà vy in the 18th century. Tuchman's great talent, the gift that distinguishes her from so many otherwise capable historians, is her ability to write history as intellectual narrative, to weave dense, interlocking facts into an ever-growing framework that is not necessarily chronological but which always ends up precisely where it is supposed to go.
With her usual grace and sweep, the author of A Distant Mirror, The Proud Tower, and The Guns of August describes the American Revolution from the European point of view.
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