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WILLIAM COOPER'S TOWN

A STORY OF POWER AND PERSUASION ON THE FRONTIER OF THE EARLY AMERICAN REPUBLIC

Good social history, weak literary criticism, but the standout here is William Cooper himself, a true American original. (16...

The story of a man's spectacular career in post–Revolutionary War New York and his famous son's novelistic effort to rewrite it.

The ambitious middle son of a poor Pennsylvania Quaker family, William Cooper (1754-1809) married in 1774 and used his in-laws' wealth and status to set himself up as a farmer, land speculator, and shopkeeper. But Cooper's real opportunity came in the 1780s, when he bought up the mortgage to a large tract of land near Otsego Lake on the New York frontier. Using tactics of questionable legality—including buying out Benjamin Franklin's exiled loyalist son, William, without his knowledge—Cooper managed to gain control of the Otsego land and sell it off quickly, simultaneously developing the area and securing his ill-gotten gains. He offered favorable terms to settlers and so earned their trust and loyalty. At the same time, Cooper ingratiated himself with wealthy landowners by managing their land with fantastic success. Cooper became a Federalist political force, and his wealth increased, but his hasty actions often led to disastrous consequences, and in his effort to become a gentleman, he lost touch with the frontiersmen who had made him a success. At his death in 1809—which Taylor (History/Univ. of Calif., Davis) persuasively argues was not the result of a blow to the head by a political opponent, as Cooper's biographers have long claimed—he left a shaky domain, the management of which fell largely on the incapable shoulders of his youngest son, James Fenimore. Unable to save his father's empire in actuality, the novelist sought to reclaim it in The Pioneers(1823), a fictional rendering of his father's fantastic life.

Good social history, weak literary criticism, but the standout here is William Cooper himself, a true American original. (16 pages illustrations, 7 maps, not seen)

Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1995

ISBN: 0-394-58054-0

Page Count: 688

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1995

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NIGHT

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. 

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006

ISBN: 0374500010

Page Count: 120

Publisher: Hill & Wang

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006

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INTO THE WILD

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990). 

Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996

ISBN: 0-679-42850-X

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Villard

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995

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