A worthwhile Civil War biography cogently presented and ready for the big screen.
An audacious paragon of the Civil War, now largely forgotten, is brought back to life, and his rags-to-riches adventure is certainly worth the revisit.
In the cotton-rich cradle of the Confederacy, not far from Charleston, South Carolina, Robert Smalls (1839-1915) was born a slave. Once an illiterate house servant in the Beaufort home of his owner, the affable Smalls quickly became a hero in the North and an enemy in the South. It all started when the clever Smalls conceived of and executed a plan to release himself, his family, and several others from bondage and, in the doing, render a service to the Union. It was a dramatic, even cinematic, scheme. Smalls was a proficient steersman, hired out to work aboard the Planter, a Confederate steamer, in Charleston’s harbor. One day in May 1862, with his black crew and frightened passengers aboard, he commandeered the ship and navigated it out to the Union blockade of Charleston. In the dim light, disguised with the boat captain’s distinctive headgear, Smalls sailed the Planter past Southern fortifications port and starboard. It was an impressive feat. Reliable, congenial, and whip-smart, he became the toast of the North. He assumed the captaincy of the Planter, lectured in Northern cities, met President Abraham Lincoln, and assisted freed slaves (who were, to keep them free, considered “contraband”). Smalls also learned to read and write, became a man of means, and bought and occupied the Beaufort home of his former master. He even became a member of Congress. This is unquestionably a remarkable story, and journalist Lineberry (The Secret Rescue: An Untold Story of American Nurses and Medics Behind Nazi Lines, 2013, etc.) ably tells it as a microcosm of the war. It’s a tale of politics and battles told with clarity, and the matter-of-fact discussions of people owning other people remains as jarring as it should.
A worthwhile Civil War biography cogently presented and ready for the big screen.Pub Date: June 20, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-10186-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
