Toyah

The 2008 Democratic Primary rumbles on and more and more people are getting into trouble for things they say during the campaign. Geraldine Ferraro was cut loose from the Clinton camp for suggesting that Obama's heritage gives him an advantage, Obama had to can a staffer for referring to Hillary as a monster, and this week James Carville is under fire for comparing Bill Richardson to Judas.

All of these quotes, of course, would get a big "who gives a damn" from me, but there are two things of consequence...

1. The left is having to endure the same PC whippings that conservatives have faced in the past. Perhaps this will lead to some general disdain for the whole correctness movement.

2. The primary continues to divide democrats and give McCain an egde in the general election.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend... political correctness to the rescue.

Labels: 2008 election

Battle Cry of Freedom, by James M. McPherson
$13.57 at Amazon.com

Most treatments of the Civil War focus on the battles, but McPherson spends a good deal of the first part of the book discussing all the events that led up to the war. It would be easy to get bogged down in the minutia, or to lose track of the chronology of events, since many chapters have to jump back a few years to trace the history of their topic. So you might finish a chapter on the contentious history of the tariff, ending say in 1860, and in the next chapter have to jump back to 1850 to discuss abolitionism. But I found the pre-war discussion to be engaging and easy to follow, clearly important when attempting a one-volume discussion of the Civil War.

Thankfully, the battles did not suffer by comparison; indeed, they are the most exciting part. Knowing something about Gettysburg, Shiloh, and some of the others, I found McPherson an effective narrator of the battle itself and the effect of the battle on the armies, the Union and Confederate publics, and on the international community, when it affected them. I appreciated the extra details on the fluctuating fortunes of the Confederacy in London and Paris, and was surprised at how close the Confederacy came to achieving intervention from one or both of these powers, several times.

Thus, as a treatment of the Civil War, Battle Cry of Freedom lives up to its reputation as the best concise treatment of the war era. If it has a fault, it is in a too-brief discussion of the post-war period. Some six or seven chapters were devoted to the pre-war situation, but only part of the last chapter address reconstruction to any degree. To be sure, books must end somewhere, and the end of the war is a better ending point than most. Still, it’s a pity that he could not give the post-war era as much attention as he gave the pre-war time.

Labels: books, On my desk