Lee surrendered to rumpled Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox. How President Lincoln, who only a week before had stridden the streets of fallen Richmond talking to newly freed slaves, was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth. And of how Confederate Gen.
Joseph E. Johnston surrendered his remaining forces to Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman at Bennett House in North Carolina, thus ending, except for a few meaningless battles lasting into May, a four-year conflict that took more than , lives. But Winik, author of On the Brink , an account of the Reagan administration and the Cold War's end, is after a different story in his big, ambitious and penetrating new book. Rather than giving us only straight history although his narration is wonderfully vivid , Winik takes us on a highly informative critical odyssey that covers the background of the Civil War and shows how it might have ended differently.
Like the United States, they became nation-states through war, not by some neat and tidy legislative act or treaty. In breaking away from this provincial view, Winik draws from his vast experience as a senior staff member with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and uses his firsthand knowledge to explain why so many 20th-century civil wars followed a cycle of endless bloodshed.
In the case of the United States, the author found a surprising spirit of reconciliation that appeared immediately after Appomattox. While Winik is correct that these magnanimous gestures make the American experience exceptional, the final month of the war did not make the nation whole. Not until the Federal government returned home rule to the white South in the s and the United States became involved in the Spanish-American War did Northerners and Southerners come together as Americans.
Instead, it saved it. In April , Jay Winik masterfully breathes new life into the end of a war and the events we only thought we knew. This gripping, panoramic narrative takes readers on a breathless ride through these tumultuous thirty days, showing that the nation's future rested on a few crucial decisions and twists of fate. Here is Richmond's dramatic fall, Lee's harrowing retreat, and the intense debate in Confederate circles over unleashing guerrilla warfare.
Here, too, is the rebel surrender at Appomattox, Lincoln's assassination five days later, and the ensuing fears of chaos and a coup, the shaky transfer of presidential power, and finally the start of national reconciliation. Outsized characters stalk through sweeping events in Winik's brilliant narrative, transforming a seeming epilogue to a great war into a centrald savingment in American history, firmly placing April in the same pantheon as and Show More Show Less. Any Condition Any Condition.
See all 34 - All listings for this product. Ratings and Reviews Write a review. Most relevant reviews. In April by Jay Winik; Jay thinks and over and over again claims that the month of April in the year , is the most important time of the civil war. Instead saved it. Jay Winik does not appreciate the forces that made the Confederate to the climax of failure.
Jay Winik also believes that even the most devoted and hardcore confederates knew they were going to lose at the end of the war. During this time in the book it was fall of , right around the time president Abraham Lincoln, was going to be reelected.
Through out the book Winik expels more stories of the month of April. This book talks …show more content… This book talks about when the United States almost started a full nuclear war because of a few soviet missiles flew into the states allegedly.
They flew Bs and Bs as air fleets for 40 years of this international problem between the Soviet Union and the United States. In the year America ended World War 2, as the head nuclear power in the world. Even though the U. It would not have been made if it were not for the cold war. The bombing of Hiroshima ended the war between the United States and Japan.
The long fall of communism was a necessity to the nature of history and peace. Little did they know that the USSR and the rest of the Soviet Union and communist would fall instead because of lacking stability and leader. This then called for scientific and industrial advancements, investments, etc. They wanted to be equal if not better. They would definitely not be beaten.
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