A text that will serve both as a solid reference work and as a milepost in the evolving and ever changing reputations of our...
A C-SPAN publication that employs surveys of historians to rank the American presidents, featuring lightly edited transcripts of interviews with historians who have published about each POTUS.
Because Donald Trump has not yet completed his term, he is not included in the rankings, but near the end, there is a transcript of a conversation among three historians about him—a fairly moderate, mostly nonjudgmental conversation. The pieces about each president are generally uniform in length (a dozen pages or so) and include basic biographical information with a justification for the reason that he has achieved his status. Unsurprisingly, Lincoln is at the top and James Buchanan at the bottom. Among the pleasures of the texts are the little-known—and sometimes quirky—details about the presidents: George Washington didn’t like to be touched; Teddy Roosevelt saw the last live passenger pigeon; James Monroe nearly fought a duel with Alexander Hamilton; John Quincy Adams loved the work of Lord Byron. Also intriguing are the factoids that do not appear—e.g., the chapter on Franklin Pierce doesn’t mention that Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote his campaign biography and that Pierce was with the author of The Scarlet Letter when he died. The issue of slavery comes up continually—no surprise since many of the early presidents owned slaves—and some writers try to soften this by mentioning how this was another time. Some of the contributors who deal with the low-ranking presidents (Harding, Pierce, Buchanan, and others) manage to find some things to admire: Harding appointed a great Cabinet; Buchanan was highly qualified. The contributor list is impressive: Douglas Brinkley, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Harold Holzer, David Maraniss, Robert Caro, Amity Shlaes, Evan Thomas, and Edna Greene Medford, among many others.
A text that will serve both as a solid reference work and as a milepost in the evolving and ever changing reputations of our presidents.Pub Date: April 23, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5417-7433-9
Page Count: 560
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2019
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.
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
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.
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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