This book was a stem-winder. It was frightfully fixated on some areas and quite lazy in its coverage of others. It focused much on the writer's hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts and on the Boston Associates, but it summarized the postwar South in terms that really understated its horror and repeated the now rejected old saws about the South's massive corruption at the hands of the Reconstruction authorities. It was picaresque in its colorful writing, but it was not altogether trustworthy in its characterizations or facts.

Share/Like this Review?