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. This first volume, ending as it does shortly after the Emancipation Proclamation, leaves the reader aware that while history writes the South's defeat, the first two years wrote a balance of victory - with the writing on the wall only faintly decipherable.Įlie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. But he cuts some of the glamour away from some of the Southern heroes, too. Furthermore, while one concedes an extraordinary objectivity in view of his background as a Mississippian, his gift for respecting the opponent worthy of his steel, he is unfortunately all too ready, it seems, to accept and lay stress on such rumors and canards as, for instance, Grant's alcoholism and anti-Semitism, and some of the less palatable aspects of Lincoln's personality and shortcomings.

Because of these limitations of substance and handling, this cannot be a definitive history without statement of the boundaries. He has taken the men he has followed the tortuous pattern of war, throughout its sprawling lines, war on land and war on water he has recounted the battles, distilling the essence by the novelist's creative processes, seeking, he says, as a novelist the same truth sought by the historian. Nor- throughout the crowded first two years- is there anything more than passing mention of the repercussions on the citizens above and below the line. Nothing is here of the years of tension and the factors that went into the making of war. The telling starts with the two political and ideological leaders:-Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln and with the contretemps which precipitated the firing on Fort Sumter. There is little here of cause and effect. Quite evidently, it is war as it was manipulated by the men in key positions, for almost consistently one sees action as he sees it through the generals and their lieutenants. A novelist, he has viewed the facts exhaustively, through primary sources, contemporary writing and the recreation of the most gifted of the historians and biographers. The first of three volumes- and this one five years in the writing- this bids fair to be a definitive history within the limitations.

The civil war a narrative