Word: sobel
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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There is no one named Napoleon in Sobel's history. Aaron Burr does not shoot Hamilton. There is no Civil War, although the C.N.A. and the United States of Mexico fight the Rocky Mountain War in 1845-52. Karl Marx remains an obscure German professor, but Bernard Kramer, an inspired monopolist, builds a business empire that becomes a world power by the middle of the 20th century...
...ROBERT SOBEL...
...comes Historian Robert Sobel to change the familiar story and report Burgoyne's "splendid victory" at Saratoga, the subsequent crushing of the American rebellion, the execution of Radicals Jefferson, Sam Adams, John Adams, Patrick Henry and Tom Paine, and the sentencing and life imprisonment of the bumbler Washington. Sobel, professor of history at New College, Hempstead, N.Y., goes on to describe the formation under the Crown's benevolent authority of the Confederation of North America with Burgoyne as first viceroy. Hamilton, Madison, Nathanael Green and the other irreconcilable dissidents lead thousands of former rebels on what...
Spirit. This is revisionist history carried to the most amiable extreme. It bears a distant relationship to George MacDonald Eraser's superb Flashman memoirs. But while Eraser has produced some remarkable light entertainment, Sobel has manufactured an obsessive parlor game. He is a master pedant who, without cracking a smile, plods through heavily footnoted mock details of North America's internal and external struggles from 1775 to the present. Indeed, there is so much beady-eyed detail that a reader can argue as well about the C.N.A.'s 1966 election (Carter Monaghan, of the People...
Among the glories of Sobel's history is a bibliography of several dozen volumes (Green, Davis: A President Dies; the Assassination of Omar Kincaid. New York, 1960. Harper, Alexander: Banking Policies in the United States of Mexico During the Arkins Years, Mexico City, 1950). If Sobel and other players who take up his parlor game carry his obsession a small step further to absurdity, they can be expected to flush out some of the books behind these titles, then publish scholarly articles that take issue with the books, then letters to the editors, pointing out the errors...