The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events-making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. 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.
about warfare, airpower, World War II and a turning point in world history.'' The Enola Gay conflict, writes University of Wisconsin history professor Paul Boyer, was about ``the disparity between the mythic past inscribed in popular memory and the past that is the raw material of historical scholarship.'' This round of history wars, conclude the writers in this excellent collection, was won by the myth-makers.Įlie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. But there is unanimous regret among the essayists that an opportunity was lost, as Kohn writes, ``to inform the American people. Kohn concludes, for instance, that it wasn't a balanced presentation New York University history professor Marilyn B. The writers are not uniformly supportive of the planned exhibit: Former air force chief historian Richard H. These essays take the controversy as the starting point for ruminations on American attitudes toward war, the nuclear age, and, with exceptional insight, history itself. The Enola Gay is now displayed virtually out of context. Under relentless attack, the museum backed down and its director resigned. Conservatives claimed the exhibit would be anti-nuclear and anti-war, throwing into question the decision to drop the bomb, and would transform the Enola Gay's crew from heroes to terrorists. The exhibit, marking the event's 50th anniversary, would have described the intense desire to end the war that led to the bombing, but also the way the bombing's nightmarish effects infected the world with fear of nuclear annihilation. The curators of the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum planned an ambitious exhibit centered on the Enola Gay, the airplane used to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima on Aug. Linenthal (Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America's Holocaust Museum, 1995, etc.), Engelhardt, and six other historians use a bitter controversy to consider America's attitudes toward its past.