Alright. The book I read today was called Andersonville Journey by Edward F. Roberts. It's concerned mostly with the figures involved with the tragedy that was the Andersonville prison back during that there War of the Northern Aggression. And I won't make any jokes about the violent states' right advocate in me saying them Unionists had it coming....
It's just as crushing and sickening to see the pictures that came out of the Andersonville prison as anything you see coming out of the Holocaust. Not to compare the two, necessarily. It's two different animals, when you get to it. The horror that was Andersonville was due largely to incompetence on the part of Confederate planners.
The book itself is rather spotty. Its narrative doesn't flow well. It will mention people as key figures in the story, but not explain exactly their roll or origins until later. And often these explanations come in the form of an aside. It's a little annoying too, the way certain people's life stories are given when they had very little actually to do with Andersonville or its subsequent trials.
On the whole, I give the book a C. Informative. Readable. But Roberts has an agenda, it seems, to clear the names of as many people as is humanly possible. Man, the dude has a real problem with Lincoln's Secretary of War Edwin Stanton.
So what if the guy had an unhealthy preoccupation with death, bordering on lunacy? You know, like where he'd dress his wife up and undress her like a doll. Or had his daughter exhumed just to have her in the house? Or kept the remains of Mary Surratt or the aforementioned Henry Wirz around the office. Just for kicks.
Like none of us has any problems.
But as coincidence would have it, the folks are coming back from Florida, and they'd mentioned possibly stopping at Andersonville. Mom says I've been there on one of the enrichment summer trips my elementary school would take. But honestly, how much is an 8-year-old kid supposed to remember about what is now a cemetary?
What they should have been doing is frightening us with stories of Edwin Stanton.
All those opportunities for enrichment and learning passed by me mostly, because I was more looking forward to swimming at the pool at the hotel. Also, riding on the bus. I liked riding the bus.
It's just as crushing and sickening to see the pictures that came out of the Andersonville prison as anything you see coming out of the Holocaust. Not to compare the two, necessarily. It's two different animals, when you get to it. The horror that was Andersonville was due largely to incompetence on the part of Confederate planners.
The book itself is rather spotty. Its narrative doesn't flow well. It will mention people as key figures in the story, but not explain exactly their roll or origins until later. And often these explanations come in the form of an aside. It's a little annoying too, the way certain people's life stories are given when they had very little actually to do with Andersonville or its subsequent trials.
On the whole, I give the book a C. Informative. Readable. But Roberts has an agenda, it seems, to clear the names of as many people as is humanly possible. Man, the dude has a real problem with Lincoln's Secretary of War Edwin Stanton.
So what if the guy had an unhealthy preoccupation with death, bordering on lunacy? You know, like where he'd dress his wife up and undress her like a doll. Or had his daughter exhumed just to have her in the house? Or kept the remains of Mary Surratt or the aforementioned Henry Wirz around the office. Just for kicks.
Like none of us has any problems.
But as coincidence would have it, the folks are coming back from Florida, and they'd mentioned possibly stopping at Andersonville. Mom says I've been there on one of the enrichment summer trips my elementary school would take. But honestly, how much is an 8-year-old kid supposed to remember about what is now a cemetary?
What they should have been doing is frightening us with stories of Edwin Stanton.
All those opportunities for enrichment and learning passed by me mostly, because I was more looking forward to swimming at the pool at the hotel. Also, riding on the bus. I liked riding the bus.
posted by Tommy at
22:36
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