Word: antietam
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...fact, Safire consistently skimps on physical descriptions. Photographers reach Antietam, the scene of the bloodiest battle in American history. What does it look like? How does it feel to be in the middle of unimaginable carnage? Safire disposes of such questions in two perfunctory sentences. Then he gets to the important part, a detailed exposition of how photographs are made, circa 1862: "He coated a sheet of glass with collodion, the guncotton dissolved in alcohol and sulphuric ether mixed with a little bromide and iodide of potassium they had compounded the night before...
First Manassas was such noisy, nostalgic fun that the organizers are talking about staging the battles of Cedar Mountain and Antietam next year, Gettysburg in 1988, the Wilderness Campaign in 1989 and Appomattox in 1990. In the meantime, there is no danger of peace breaking out and boring everyone. If the French and Indian War catches your imagination, there are rousing battles at Old Fort Niagara, a restored 18th century stronghold on Lake Ontario. The conflict usually re-enacted is the siege of Fort Niagara, won by the British in 1759. But, one Saturday not long ago, the Siege...
Thomas Keneally, 50, is an Australian novelist (The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith), playwright (Bullie's House), screenwriter (Silver City) and movie actor (The Devil's Playground). The subjects of his nearly 20 books are equally protean: Joan of Arc, the U.S. Civil War battle at Antietam, World War I armistice negotiations, exploration in Antarctica. His 1982 volume, Schindler's List, set off a literary tempest: although it told of an actual German businessman who saved some 1,300 Jews from the Nazis, the book was awarded Britain's prestigious Booker McConnell prize for fiction, eligible apparently because Keneally used novelistic...
...Confederates. Thomas Keneally slides around discussions of institutional change while clinging to the basic currency of fiction--the individual. Though Keneally depicts many of the war's most studied battles, he resists the temptaion to offer an overview. He plants characters in the battle of Antietam, where America lost as many men in one day as it did during its whole engagement in Vietnam, but he describes the slaughter only from the perspectives of individual soldiers. While the authors of other recent, successful war novels, such as Shogun, Trinity, and War and Remembrance, use the biography of a central character...