RaveThe Washington Post... shows that Bull Durham is popular partly because it is funny, but it also reveals an additional source of the movie’s enduring appeal: willingness to address aging ... Annie would channel Walt Whitman here, but I am reminded of Abraham Lincoln, who, upon leaving Springfield, Ill., in 1861, noted his passing from young to old. Shelton’s book illuminates the centrality of that universal passage.
Michael Gorra
PositiveThe Washington PostGorra could not have foreseen our current moment when he began this work of biography, history and literary criticism. Yet his extended meditation on whether and why we should continue to read the work of a privileged White novelist from Jim Crow Mississippi often seems to describe exactly where we are ... Gorra does not shy away from [Faulkner\'s racist] failings, but he does try to soften them with regretful sighs about how such views were typical of most Mississippians in Faulkner’s day ... By creating characters like McCaslin, Gorra demonstrates, Faulkner \'became better than he was\' and spoke in a voice we still need to hear. That voice tells us that slavery was. The Civil War was. Violent racist oppression was. And here we are again.
Stephanie McCurry
PositiveThe Washington PostMcCurry makes...broad points crystal clear, even as she raises questions on finer ones ... The chapter about Gertrude Thomas and her family’s precipitous fall helps us notice things we might otherwise miss about the meaning of emancipation and the wild contingency of the war’s end, when nobody knew how things would turn out. Thomas’s individual misfortunes notwithstanding, the chapter’s bold claims about the downfall of the planter class are tough to sustain in light of hard evidence that the planter class endured a momentary stumble rather than a permanent fall ... The book lands its strongest blows in the chapter about the Lieber Code. Before the Civil War, no systematic legal guidelines governed armies’ treatment of noncombatants ... In sum, the book’s chief takeaway is that the Civil War and emancipation constituted genuine revolutions whose true radicalness women helped cause and that we can fully see only when we write histories of war with women included ... She is lamentably and undeniably right that where women and war are concerned...but perhaps this book will make forgetting a little more difficult.
