Showing posts with label Civil War. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Civil War. Show all posts
Friday, June 7, 2013
Glory
From my writing the story of Blanco Gregor, the history teacher, I thought of this film. Watched it. Remains, in my mind, a magnificent film. The acting is superb: Morgan Freeman, Matthew Broderickl, Cary Elwes, Andre Braugher, Jihmi Kennedy, and, of course, Denzel, are superb. What a fine film. Ebert gave it 3.5 out of a possible 4 stars.
Wednesday, July 25, 2012
Madness visible
di Giovanni, Janine. (2003). Madness visible: a memoir of war. New York: Knopf.
I saw her on the Charlie Rose show last week, along with three other guests, all discussing Syria. I found each of them smart and interesting. I got this book, opened it, read the first tow paragraphs of her introduction, and got chills: I can not read about war and cruelty so very easily any longer.
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears
Mengestu, Dinaw. (2006). The beautiful things that heaven bears. New York: Riverhead Books.
A wonderful read.
Mengestu has a fine ear for the way immigrants from damaged places talk in the sanctuary of their own company, free from the exhausting courtesies of self-anthropologizing explanation. He gets, pitch perfect, the warmly abrasive wit of the violently displaced and their need to keep alive some textured memories — even memories that wound — amid America’s demanding amnesia. Mengestu understands the threats these men face, not least the threat of expectations. Ken can finally afford to buy himself some dental work that would help him assimilate upward, but he chooses not to: “ ‘You can never forget where you came from if you have teeth as ugly as these,’ he said. He grinned once more. He tapped a slightly brown front tooth for effect.”
Sparely described, yet fully so, Joe from Congo and Ken from Kenya are magnificent characters that round out the male side, and the African side, of Stephanos.
What more potent setting is there than Washington for a novel about the architecture of hope and memory? As Stephanos wanders, Bloom-like, down back streets and broad avenues, he takes in both the neglected statuary that attempts to do the official work of remembrance and the anonymous heroisms of ordinary people, unnoticed by anyone but a neighbor or a storekeeper or a child. Mengestu also widens his canvas by giving the novel a romantic turn, reviving an old plot device: a stranger comes to town.
All they ever share, physically, Stephanos and Judith, is a kiss; spiritually they are reluctant to get closer.
It’s rare that a novelist who can comfortably take on knotty political subjects like exile, memory and class conflict is also able to write with wisdom, wit and tenderness about the frisson of romance. Mengestu skillfully sketches the precarious attraction between Stephanos and Judith, but his portrait of the bond between Stephanos and Naomi is even more extraordinary. In our culture’s rigid judgment, a friendship between an 11-year-old girl and a 36-year-old man is creepy by default. The bravest thing about Mengestu’s novel is the way he pours such deep, nonsexual yearning into this relationship, which is life-saving for Stephanos and Naomi alike.
It is a beautiful relationship that has substance and elan.
Again and again, Stephanos’s story makes us consider what it means to be displaced: from a local community, from a distant nation, from a love you had hoped to settle into. In Mengestu’s work, there’s no such thing as the nondescript life. He notices, and there are whole worlds in his noticing. He has written a novel for an age ravaged by the moral and military fallout of cross-cultural incuriosity. In a society slick with “truthiness” — and Washington may be the capital of that — there’s something hugely hopeful about this young writer’s watchful honesty and egalitarian tenderness. This is a great African novel, a great Washington novel and a great American novel.
Amen. 'Tis indeed.
Saturday, June 27, 2009
The state of Jones
The State of Jones
By Sally Jenkins and John Stauffer
Doubleday, 402 pages, $27.50
The idea is beguiling: a region in the South during the Civil War where the inhabitants, disgusted by slavery and unwilling to support the Confederate cause, take up arms as Union loyalists. Better still, for storytelling purposes, would be a charismatic leader who organizes the resistance.
Such is the legend of what became known as the “Free State of Jones,” a county deep in Mississippi’s piney woods. The area was one of many pockets in the state where dissatisfaction with the Confederacy boiled for much of the war, but only Jones County was elevated by folklore, especially in the decades after the war, into a scene of noble rebellion. It helped that the anti-Confederate faction there was led by a tall, stern backwoodsman named Newton Knight.
The operative words here are “legend” and “folklore.” Although Sally Jenkins and John Stauffer labor mightily in “The State of Jones” to make the case for Newt Knight and Jones County as emblems of enlightened “insurrection” within the Confederacy, the truth, alas, is hardly as inspiring as the authors suppose. Far from being a haven for the high-minded, Jones County was a magnet for Confederate deserters. Their hostility to being executed, imprisoned or pressed back into the service of a lost cause was the men’s animating principle.
“As far as the foot soldiers were concerned, the other side could have the damned town. The generals might have gladly given it up too, if not for the railroad junction. ” Read an excerpt from ‘The State of Jones’
It would have helped the authors’ argument if the book were simply better organized—the narrative is often difficult to follow—and if they had been more comfortable with Civil War history. They don’t place the battle of Corinth, or other Mississippi clashes described in the book, within the larger context of the war. Why did these fights happen and why were they important to the wartime fortunes of Mississippi? We’re also left to wonder about Knight’s experience in battle. The authors focus mostly on the “insufferable” day-to-day life of Confederate soldiers.
It wasn’t long, of course, before the bothersome deserters in Jones County became irrelevant to a Rebel army in retreat. Here the book’s interest shifts fully to the life of Newt Knight, during Reconstruction and beyond. As it happened, Knight was married to a white woman but also had a long-running affair with a black woman, even maintaining two separate households. Ms. Jenkins and Mr. Stauffer take this as evidence of Knight’s anti-racist, anti-slavery bona fides, but miscegenation had long been commonplace in the South, even—or especially—among slave owners, who took care of their mixed-blood offspring.
To be sure, Knight went beyond most in his studious maintenance of two households, one white and one black. And the arrangement resulted in many trials for him and his family—his white wife left him, jealousy raged between his two sets of children, and later generations intermarried without regard for their blood links. This is a complicated story, and the authors handle it well; it is easily the most interesting part of the book.
— Michael Ballard, the author of “Vicksburg: The Campaign That Opened the Mississippi,” is the coordinator of the Congressional and Political Research Center at the Mississippi State University Library.
The New York Public Library/Art Resource NY - The Tishomingo Hotel in Corinth, Miss., was used at different times as a hospital by both Union and Rebel troops.
Collection of Herman Welborn - Newton Knight, a Confederate medic and deserter
By Sally Jenkins and John Stauffer
Doubleday, 402 pages, $27.50
The idea is beguiling: a region in the South during the Civil War where the inhabitants, disgusted by slavery and unwilling to support the Confederate cause, take up arms as Union loyalists. Better still, for storytelling purposes, would be a charismatic leader who organizes the resistance.
Such is the legend of what became known as the “Free State of Jones,” a county deep in Mississippi’s piney woods. The area was one of many pockets in the state where dissatisfaction with the Confederacy boiled for much of the war, but only Jones County was elevated by folklore, especially in the decades after the war, into a scene of noble rebellion. It helped that the anti-Confederate faction there was led by a tall, stern backwoodsman named Newton Knight.
The operative words here are “legend” and “folklore.” Although Sally Jenkins and John Stauffer labor mightily in “The State of Jones” to make the case for Newt Knight and Jones County as emblems of enlightened “insurrection” within the Confederacy, the truth, alas, is hardly as inspiring as the authors suppose. Far from being a haven for the high-minded, Jones County was a magnet for Confederate deserters. Their hostility to being executed, imprisoned or pressed back into the service of a lost cause was the men’s animating principle.
“As far as the foot soldiers were concerned, the other side could have the damned town. The generals might have gladly given it up too, if not for the railroad junction. ” Read an excerpt from ‘The State of Jones’
It would have helped the authors’ argument if the book were simply better organized—the narrative is often difficult to follow—and if they had been more comfortable with Civil War history. They don’t place the battle of Corinth, or other Mississippi clashes described in the book, within the larger context of the war. Why did these fights happen and why were they important to the wartime fortunes of Mississippi? We’re also left to wonder about Knight’s experience in battle. The authors focus mostly on the “insufferable” day-to-day life of Confederate soldiers.
It wasn’t long, of course, before the bothersome deserters in Jones County became irrelevant to a Rebel army in retreat. Here the book’s interest shifts fully to the life of Newt Knight, during Reconstruction and beyond. As it happened, Knight was married to a white woman but also had a long-running affair with a black woman, even maintaining two separate households. Ms. Jenkins and Mr. Stauffer take this as evidence of Knight’s anti-racist, anti-slavery bona fides, but miscegenation had long been commonplace in the South, even—or especially—among slave owners, who took care of their mixed-blood offspring.
To be sure, Knight went beyond most in his studious maintenance of two households, one white and one black. And the arrangement resulted in many trials for him and his family—his white wife left him, jealousy raged between his two sets of children, and later generations intermarried without regard for their blood links. This is a complicated story, and the authors handle it well; it is easily the most interesting part of the book.
— Michael Ballard, the author of “Vicksburg: The Campaign That Opened the Mississippi,” is the coordinator of the Congressional and Political Research Center at the Mississippi State University Library.
The New York Public Library/Art Resource NY - The Tishomingo Hotel in Corinth, Miss., was used at different times as a hospital by both Union and Rebel troops.
Collection of Herman Welborn - Newton Knight, a Confederate medic and deserter
Saturday, April 4, 2009
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
New Civil War book
Master of War: The Life of General George H. Thomas.Bobrick, Benson (author).
Feb. 2009. 432p. illus. Simon & Schuster, hardcover, $28
Review:
Bobrick’s admirable biography of Union General George Thomas is the first full-scale treatment in too many years. The scion of a slaveholding Virginia family, Thomas had a distinguished prewar career, including service in the Mexican War and continuously after it until the outbreak of civil war. Alienating his family, he remained in Union service and quickly proved his mettle. His record during the last two years of the war was stellar: an epic stand at Chickamauga, victory at Missionary Ridge, solid work in the Atlanta campaign, and a final decisive victory at Nashville. Possibly the ablest tactician of the war—not to mention one of its most attractive personalities—Thomas failed to receive his due, Bobrick argues, because he failed to write his memoirs (he died on active duty in 1870) and because of the envy of men like Sherman and Grant, both of whom did. Bobrick may not prove his case against Thomas’ superiors, but he certainly persuades us that Thomas deserved the honorific with which the book is titled. Civil War collections, rejoice.
— Roland Green
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