10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Disjointed and Polemical, September 24, 2002
This review is from: In Glory's Shadow: The Citadel, Shannon Faulkner, and a Changing America (Paperback)
This book sets out to be many things. It succeeds at none of them. As a result, it's not only disjointed and confusing, but soaked through with bias as well.
One the one hand, author Catherine S. Manegold, a defense reporter for the New York Times, writes of the fight over the admission of Shannon Faulkner to The Citadel as a metaphor of South versus North. At the same time, she presents the chronology of a legal battle. And a biography of Ms Faulkner. And a sociological study of life at a military college. If Ms Manegold had concentrated on any one of these things, the book might have been more successful.
But apparently she couldn't decide which tack to take, and so the book ends up muddled. Long biographical introductions are given to people who end up playing minor parts in the drama. Lines are drawn for a conflict of cultures -- hidebound, traditional, inbred, hypocritical Charleston versus dynamic, hip, multicultural, liberal New York City -- but this allegory is abandoned as soon as it's developed. The central legal battles are disposed of in a series of 'the lawyers said ... the judges said,' and then, presto!, Ms Faulkner is in the door.
Ms Faulkner herself is the central figure in this drama, but at the end of the book, many questions about her remain unanswered. Did she apply to The Citadel purely on a whim, as it seems at first? Did she want the luster that comes with a Citadel ring (The Ring is almost Wagnerian in its significance), the 'network' and 'connections,' without understanding that the network depends on the shared experience of surviving the Citadel? Were her energies so focused on the legal fight that she was unprepared for what she found when she got in? When she left The Citadel, she complained that she had no friends in the school or the Corps. Was she really so naïve as to expect the school she and her lawyers had spent years attacking to offer her a warm embrace once she battered the doors down? None of these questions are adequately answered. It's not even clear whether the days Ms Faulkner spent in the infirmary were due to heat stroke, a mental or emotional breakdown, physical collapse, or something else entirely.
Instead, we get strange asides, like the bizarre suggestion that harassment of Ms Faulkner was connected to Caribbean voodoo rituals. Or four irrelevant pages rehashing the charges against one of the Left's favorite targets, the School of the Americas.
Interestingly, two of the most evocative sections of the book -- a harrowing account of Hell Week and the strangely moving epilogue 'Fear is like a Tree' -- contain barely a mention of Ms Faulkner at all.
Most Americans probably don't have real strong feelings about The Citadel one way or another. On the extremes, though, are people who really, really love the school, and others who really, really hate it. It's pretty clear whose side Ms Manegold is on.
Unlike Dr Laura Fairchild Brodie, who wrote about 'assimilation' of women at VMI, Ms Manegold is not 'the band director's wife.' Not, that is, someone who knows the story from the inside. She seems not to have even residual sympathy for The Citadel as an institution, for the young men (and women) who attend it, or for the administrators wrestling with how to adapt to a society that has rejected nearly everything they value. Considering the patronizing, even sneering, tone she sometimes takes toward the military and people who serve in it, it's surprising Ms Manegold could have endured a career as a defense reporter.
As Ms Manegold tells it, the original sin of The Citadel was to have been founded for the purpose of training militias in the suppression of slave revolts and the perpetuation of the planter-dominated caste system. The Citadel apparently is tainted by this sin forever, and neither the school nor the author can ever overcome it: she mentions it frequently, often gratuitously. After the War and the end of slavery, The Citadel turned inward, and cadets practiced on one another the social suppression and physical abuse they could no longer impose on slaves. This is what passes for sociological analysis in this book.
That's too bad, because there is clearly an interesting and important story here. Maybe someday, someone will find a more effective, less polemical, way to tell it. In the meantime, read Nancy Mace's book instead.
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10 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
What you would expect, October 26, 2001
By A Customer
This review is from: In Glory's Shadow: The Citadel, Shannon Faulkner, and a Changing America (Paperback)
This book was rarely accurate and hardly worth the time I took reading it. Preaching from a single-minded point of view, the author professes to understand a culture and institution where she is an outsider. Having experienced The Citadel experience first hand, I can assure you it is one that is not easily explained to the outsider. Perhaps I am being a bit harsh, but quite a few of the points made in this book reflect upon a mind set that I can not comprehend. Read for yourselves, but I also implore you to keep an open mind about a school that has produced some of the finest patriots of the United States.
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5 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Insightful Analysis of Life in Soutnern Military Culture, December 9, 2001
This review is from: In Glory's Shadow: The Citadel, Shannon Faulkner, and a Changing America (Paperback)
Catherine Manegold has written a mesmerizing story of the first female applicant to the Citadel, a southern military college located in Charleston, South Carolina. It traces the history and traditions of a formerly exclusive male domain with all the painful insights needed to fully explain the trauma and degradation which go into initiation into such an oppressive
culture. You will be amazed, you will be shocked at the measures
taken in an effort to refuse to enter the 20th century. She exposes us to the cyclical and circular patterns of what it means
to wear the Citadel ring. In this system men are traumatized by life outside the code, estanblished by the process of indoctrination, to the degree that many of them come back to alma mater as teachers and administrators in order to perpetuate the way of life they hold so dear beacuse they can't make it anywhere else. It is frightening, even terrifying, to learn about the code of silence and the extent to which these men will go to protect their patriarchal, domineering society. Manegold makes very real something so foreign to modern culture. Her painstaking analysis of the whys and wherefores of Shannon Faullkner's attempt to break the gender barrier is the best you will find anywhere. It's well worth the read, but be prepared to lose some sleep when you learn this medieval approach to military education still exists in today's USA.
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