Appearance
Dixie Betrayed: How the South Really Lost the Civil War
The book describes in considerable detail some of the political issues of concern to President Davis, members of the Confederate Congress, and the governors of various Confederate states while the Civil War was being fought. The interest to this reader was in seeing how irrelevant most of these issues were to the survival of the Confederacy, and yet how important they were to its leaders. In addition, while we frequently read of Lincoln's interactions with his cabinet and with members of the United States Congress, we less often have the chance to view the other side.The prospective reader should be warned, however, that the book's title and subtitle wildly misrepresent its contents. The book describes neither a betrayal nor a new explanation for the South's defeat. (Had president and congress worked together in total harmony, a situation that has never existed in human history, they would not have saved the Confederacy.) A more accurate title would be: "Confederate Politics - How the Leaders of the South Attempted to Govern in the Middle of the War they had Made," but this title would doubtless have reduced sales.
Dixie Betrayed: How the South Really Lost the Civil War
Overall, this was a very easily digestible and enjoyable book to read. At the core of "Dixie Betrayed", Eicher is making two arguments. They are arguments that have been made many times before. First, that the ideological nature of the states rights argument probably doomed the C.S.A., and second, that Lost Cause romanticism has created a distortion of the true narrative of the American Civil War. However, these are good arguments to make.I feel like this book was intended to be approachable to a wide audience but will not serve much of a purpose for veteran Civil War scholars. In essence, I liked this book and learned a great deal from it but something about it makes it feel like it isn't quite the stuff that a professor teaching me the subject would assign.I think this book best serves people looking for a general study of the Civil War in a quick and painless fashion and anyone who has never looked at a good argument against the Lost Cause outlook of the war.
Dixie Betrayed: How the South Really Lost the Civil War
Eicher in Dixie Betrayed is refreshing in his willingness to be politically incorrect in his description of men and events leading to the failure of the Confederacy. Nothing he writes is new, but few historians have been willing to be so frank. Dixie Betrayed reminds me greatly of James Street's The Civil War: An Unvarnished Account of the Late but Still Lively Hostilities, which I first read in high school in the late '50s. Do not read either book if you subscribe to the Confederate myth.
Dixie Betrayed: How the South Really Lost the Civil War
Dixie Betrayed tells of the relationships between Jefferson Davis as President of the Confederacy and many of the politicians and generals in that nation. The idea that a government dominated by state-rights advocates is weak is certainly not new. Eicher sets out to show the weakness of the Confederate central government through a series of vignettes describing the relation between Davis and some other person in the government. The two main problems with this approach are: (1) Eicher assumes I know lots of things about the obscure people in the Confederate government already (which I don't); and (2) there seems to be no central thesis that is supported.I expect that a well written biography of Davis would cover most of this material in a much more comprehensive manner.
The Year of Silence (Contemporary American Fiction)
I had the pleasure of studying under Madison Smartt Bell at the University of Iowa's Writers Workshop in the late 1980s, and THE YEAR OF SILENCE was the only impression I'd had of him. But what an impression! Set in various parts of Manhattan and my home town of Brooklyn, I was in awe of this writer's command of his craft and his knowledge of the city. I figured he's spent decades honing his talents. When I arrived at the workshop, I discovered that Bell was NOT from New York City and that he was younger than me. Naturally, I wanted to strangle him.Anyway, THE YEAR OF SILENCE is a wise and sympathetic novel that prompted as many re-readings as there are narrators. Every voice is honest (even the con artist/breaking-and-entering specialist) and, above all, appealing in their own ways. Structurally, the multiple points of view is very effective, especially when you consider the book is set in the city where a person can touch so many lives (and is set in the city where everyone thinks their point of view is so important). However, the fact is that the death of the protagonist, Marian, did affect so many people who, on the surface, seem so disaffected. Marian, herself, is given a chance to speak before her untimely passing. In its way, the novel is a sort of AS I LAY DYING set in 1980s New York City.The strength of THE YEAR OF SILENCE, and I'll repeat this, is the profound appeal, the extreme humanity, of its narrators. I almost wish each one had his or her own novel. My favorite is an invalided old woman whose grandson races her through the NYU area in her wheelchair. Although she had only known Marian in passing, the news of her death prompts one of the most elegant but simple reveries on life, death and old age. THE YEAR OF SILENCE captures New Yorkers in a way that has rarely been done before. Of course, it was written by an out-of-towner.
The Year of Silence (Contemporary American Fiction)
This book is about how the suicide of a woman named Marian affects those who knew her. All these people have problems. They hate their jobs. They hate their lives. Some hate both. An example of this is a cop more interested in winning a crime pool than really helping people. We don't really get to know the people in these stories including Marian, which would seem to me to be essential. She has bad luck with men, had a couple of abortions and got into drugs. We really don't find out much more about her than that. The only character we really get to know is the dwarf panhandler/pickpocket named Jocko. His story is well fleshed out and so is he. We get a sense of who he is and how he sees the world. I would have liked to read more about him. If not for the story about him reading this book would be a complete waste of time. I found this book's title to be very appropriate since the characters don't have much of a voice. I would give this one and a half stars if I could, but since I can't it has to settle for one.