The News Journal from Wilmington, Delaware • Page 77

J4 SUNDAY NEWS JOURNAL APRIL 7, 1996 A Al Sharpton on Al Sharpton Beneath the noise lies a sober, thoughtful dissident Civil War echoes in soldiers' words lies heavily on photographs, engravings and maps. Photographs are useless if not presented well, but Baumgartner and Strayer's use of the 465 photos is exceptional. Photos are clearly linked to adjacent text. Cutlines and text blocks include the subject's views and often his fate. Other pages are set off from the overall battle narra I By KAREN WHITE Staff reporter The magnitude of the Civil War is often presented in statistics: 3.8 million men fought; 620,000 died; at Chickamauga, 28,399 were killed, wounded or missing; 12,500 were killed at Chattanooga.

But the true impact of war is felt when you can put names and faces to those bloodless statistics. That's what Richard A. Baumgartner and Larry M. Strayer do in "Echoes of Battle: The Struggle for Chattanooga." "Echoes" does not attempt to analyze strategy or tactics used in Tennessee from June to December 1863; it does not evaluate the performance of generals or pass judgment on the war's objectives. Instead, it is an account of what the men experienced, from the private on up.

Baumgartner and Strayer have organized the words of 's1' John S. Ohio, was 17 a leg at He later was Medal of Honor. some jive Brooklyn jackleg preacher, and they couldn't see why victims and everyday black people were gravitating toward me whenever there was trouble What they didn't understand was that I was seen as the person who would do something about whatever had happened." Growing up in public also means your youthful distempers are on full display. He moves too blithely through the Tawana Brawley affair, arguing no one has ever demonstrated conclusively that the attack didn't happen, and sidestepping the question of what the Brawley affair did to race relation i There are intriguing bits about his childhood, including the well-publicized revelation that his father, from whom he's been estranged, had an affair with Al's stepsister (not the father's own daughter), and what it was like moving from middle-class life to the projects after his father loft. And the stories about himself and people like Jesse Jackson and James Brown are engaging.

Sharp-ton knew Jackson as a child; they split, and many years later, reconciled. As for Brown, we now know he is' the reason for Al's hair style. But the most interesting thing about "Go and Tell is that underneath the sometimes wildly irresponsible outbursts and loudmouthery lies a potentially sober and thoughtful dissident. Sharpton writes that as long as the various Rainbow Coalition-type groups "are separated and playing a zero-sum game off of each other, the ruling class is not threatened," yet he nowhere acknowledges that his brand of racial politics often contributes to the very separation he decries. The Al Sharpton who confronts this tension will one day be well worth paying attention to.

Meet the Author HaaaHaaaaHBBBajBBDBBBBaBaBaaaaani Newark native Charles Lewis will discuss and sign copies of his book "The Buying of the President" at Books Inc. in Powder Mill Square on Delaware 52 in Greenville at 7:30 p.m. Thursday. Lewis is executive director of the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit research group in Kountz, 37th when he lost Missionary Ridge. awarded the In well-publicized cases, Al Sharp-ton gained notice, even notoriety.

Book: "Go and Tell Pharaoh: The Autobiography of the Reverend Al Sharpton" Author: Al Sharpton with Anthony Walton Publisher: Doubleday, $23.95 church). As a youngster, he was a huge fan of Adam Clayton Powell, and after many importunings, his mother took the long subway ride from Brooklyn to Harlem to hear Powell preach. Sharpton requested an audience, and when Powell agreed to see him after the service and said he'd heard of him, young Al was "in heaven." But boy preachers have to grow up, and he's had to do his growing up in public. He always seemed older, but he was just 30 when Bernhard Goetz's trial gave Sharp-ton his first real taste of holding forth before the cameras, and 32 when the racial unrest at Howard Beach unfolded. Sharpton's versions of those events, put simply, is that no white person who beat or killed a black person in New York had ever been made an example of, and he set out to make sure that changed.

In the Simpson world, we know how differently whites and blacks see the justice system. But that wasn't so well understood then, and Sharpton reveled in being the leaderprovocateur who confused and enraged the white establishment: "They thought of me as the participants into a narrative that lets the reader experience war secondhand. The primary focus is on the campaign for Chattanooga, held by the Confederates until they lost the battles of Lookout Mountain on Nov. 24 and Missionary Ridge on Nov. 25, but introductory chapters on Tullahoma and Chicka-.

mauga are included. As always with works published by Blue Acorn Press, "Echoes" re 'Tiger's Tail' wanders tive with vignettes or excerpts from firsthand accounts. The authors examined more than 1,000 sources, but limited themselves to the 450 first-person accounts from Confederate and Union eyewitnesses. The soldiers speak again through letters, diaries, journals, newspaper reports, official reports, regimental histories, veterans' periodicals and memoirs. Some writers are familiar Sam Watkins of "Co.

Aytch" fame, E. Porter Alexander and "Fighting for the Ulysses S. Grant and his "Personal Mem- oirs. But those are in the minority. Most of the writers never realized such fame.

Cpl. Merritt J. Simonds of Company 42nd Illinois, is one of the latter. On Oct. 8 he wrote his father he had been severely wounded in the right leg.

Despite being left on the Chickamauga battlefield for almost a week, he was optimistic he would recover. But on the Oct. 27 he wrote home again: "My leg is now mortifying Book: Tiger's Tail" Author: Gus Lee Publisher: Knopf, $24. 298 pages LeBlanc, but the colonel has his ways of finding out. If this novel had stuck to its basic story line, it might have been a winner.

It has one especially memorable character in Sgt. Maj. Patrick McCrail, still exuberant after rotting for eight years in a Ss'PIAYHOUSE THEATRE DU PONT BLDG WILMINGTON, DE 19801 RMS' By MICHAEL TOMASKY Newsday There are many kinds of public figures, but let us focus on two. First, there are those we celebrate because of their wisdom or achievement. They are statesmen; scientists, artists, builders; their fame is a function of their brilliance, and when they appear on TV or the front pages, they seem like stately old oaks, or even if they're young (Martin Luther King Jr.

was 26, the Beatles barely 20), they project an aura of mystery, as if they hold some secret we other louts can only guess at. Then there are those who work at it who have some talent, but who need to rely on tricks now and again to make the rest of us interested. There is probably no better, living example of a famous person who falls into the second category but aspires to the first than Alfred Sharpton. Reporters dealing with him over the years (and I'm one) know both sides of this complicated and, at 42, still young man. He's a goof, a clown, a hustler, an intemperate screecher; he's also an intelligent, serious and deeply spiritual person.

Anyone who watched closely his 1992 Democratic primary campaign for U.S. Senate saw the second Al in action, making apt (and accurate) historical allusions, citing General Accounting Office reports to drive home his arguments and generally looking statesmanlike indeed as the three supposedly serious candidates dribbled along at roughly a third-grade level. Naturally, it's this Sharpton who's on prime display in his autobiography. There's a lot of homilis-tic rhetoric about leadership and sacrifice, and about what he's learned, particularly from his 1991 stabbing: "I realized that if my life was so fragile, so contingent, then I had to be more serious about what I was doing and saying." And the man does have talent. He writes "in many ways, I grew up without a childhood," and he is vivid and entertaining in depicting himself as the "wonderboy preacher" who, to his teachers' consternation, insisted on signing his school papers "Reverend Al Sharpton" at age 10 (when he was ordained in the Pentecostal (I tW-J6 Capt.

Reuben V. Kidd, Company 4th Alabama Infantry, was shot through the heart and killed Instantly at Chickamauga. The location of his grave is unknown. Book: "Echoes of Battle: The Struggle for Chattanooga" Authors: Richard A. Baumgartner and Larry M.

Strayer Publisher: Blue Acorn Press, $43.75 postpaid from the publisher, P.O. Box 2684, Huntington, WV 25726; call (304) 733-3917 above the knee and the doctors say I cannot live more than two days at the longest. You must not take this to heart but look to a higher source for comfort, for it is God's will and I feel resigned to my fate I would like to have my body taken home and buried beside my mother." He calmly informed his father he was sending his belongings home by a friend and asked him to arrange the payment of a $2 debt. He died three days later. The authors include this footnote: "Simonds never realized his wish to be taken home to DeKalb, 111., and buried next to his mother.

His remains today lie in Chattanooga National Cemetery." off track rat- and roach-infested Korean prison, courtesy of LeBlanc. But the story meanders off base off the military base, in fact through teahouses and dens of iniquity, into the company of such disparate figures as shamans and whores, and bogs down in Asian superstitions and ancient beliefs. Capt. Kan emerges as a confusing blend of East and West. This reader found himself skipping toward the finish, wishing that Kan would close the case quickly and get back to his girlfriend's arms.

MAY 10 thru MAY 19 "A MADCAP MUSICAL." Mcl Giissow, New York Times Starring Loretta Swit Prices range from $24.00 Box office will be closed Today! great American Musical Corned leal Purchaae on atudent. (chlldsludent must be It yeari or under) 1 Ti-i-n-ir ir r. I i i i in Interesting premise bogs down in detail By ROLAND WRIGHT Staff reporter Col. Frederick C. (The Wizard) LeBlanc has been in South Korea nine years despite a U.S.

Army policy that should have rotated him back home after one year. He's the top lawyer in the Second Infantry Division, and he's rumored to be implicated in a cornucopia of corruption, a law unto himself. It is January 1974, the Vietnam War is winding down, and the Second Division is a largely forgotten unit, separated by almost two decades from the Korean armistice but aware that it polices a global hot spot where a nuclear war could suddenly flare up. As for Camp Casey, scene of much of the action: "Here was a village of GIs, living on booze and danger, counting down days." Already the Pentagon has sent one officer to investigate LeBlanc and his mafia of fellow Army lawyers, and that man has quickly disappeared. Now, Jackson Hu-chin Kari, a Chinese-born captain, gets the call from his old friend in the Inspector's General office.

Like many characters in today's fiction, Kan is a troubled man, trying to live down Vietnam and his responsibility for civilian deaths, and he is also reluctant to leave his newfound love in San Francisco. Kan, who is told to pretend he's looking into racial problems, recognizes that on this assignment his life and the lives of his two fellow investigators are in danger. He knows better than to check in with Best Sellers Fiction 1. Primary Colors Anonymous 2. In the Presence of the Enemy Elizabeth George 3.

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