A superb addition to the literature of the Revolution, by one of the best chroniclers in the business.
A lively reconstruction of the Continental Army’s finest strategic hour.
Textbook accounts of Washington’s Christmas crossing of the Delaware River are fine as they go. But why did Washington brave the ice-clogged tide in the first place, especially when he would face a supposedly much superior force of British and Hessian troops on the other side? Well, historian Fischer (Paul Revere’s Ride, 1994, etc.) answers, the British and Hessians had been beaten up pretty badly in New Jersey throughout the fall of 1776 by American guerrillas, who defied military convention and fought in plain clothes, believing “that they had a natural right to take up arms in defense of their laws and liberties.” This uprising, Fischer continues, “created an opportunity for George Washington,” who “made the most of it, in a battle that was itself a war of contingencies.” The Hessians weren’t drunk on Christmas cheer, as the legend has it, when Washington surprised them at dawn (in truth, well past dawn); they were exhausted, having been dogged into near-submission by those guerrillas—women and men—and virtually imprisoned behind the fences and stone walls of Trenton. Washington receives due credit in Fischer’s account for seizing the initiative in the face of near-rebellion on the part of supposed comrades such as General Horatio Gates, who declined to take part in operations; his soldiers receive credit too, and so do the British, and so even do the Hessians, each in their turn. Fischer’s rendering of the battle and the events leading up to and following it is richly detailed and full of surprises. Who knew that the roads to Trenton were full on that sleety, pitch-black night with farmers and woodcutters, with young men out courting, with ministers tending to their flocks? Who knew, against the legend, that the “American attackers had twice as many guns in proportion to infantry than did the Hessian garrison”?
A superb addition to the literature of the Revolution, by one of the best chroniclers in the business.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-19-517034-2
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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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