Stewart’s lively character sketches employ sprightly prose and impeccable research.
A fond portrait of the mild-mannered Virginian and implacable advocate for the young American government.
Historian and novelist Stewart (The Lincoln Deception, 2013, etc.) offers a pertinent lesson on Madison’s ability to forge working bonds with other founding members of the new American government, even if they did not always see eye to eye. Discreet, generous and nonegotistical, unlike others who hammered out the documents that framed the new government, Madison refused to take credit, rather conceding the “work of many hands and many heads” in the forging of the Constitution. Small and soft-spoken, he was overshadowed by the more dynamic personalities of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton and James Monroe, yet the complement of their respective qualities resulted in brilliant working relationships during the course of Madison’s political career. Hamilton and Madison, both in their 30s, recognized that the Articles of Confederation were inadequate for managing the new nation and had to be replaced by a stronger national government. Their energy as “impatient young men” galvanized the other delegates in Philadelphia over “framing a system which we wish to last for ages,” while their dozens of newspaper essays (written with John Jay) explaining the Constitutional structure became the incomparable work of political theory, The Federalist Papers. Madison cleverly used the power and prestige of Gen. Washington in consolidating attendance at the Convention and winning votes for the Bill of Rights, and the two largely struck the deal to build a new capital on the Potomac. In Jefferson, Madison found an intellectual kindred spirit and lifelong friend. Monroe served in Jefferson’s and Madison’s administrations and navigated the Louisiana Purchase and renewed hostility with Britain. Finally, the woman and helpmate Madison found late in life, Dolley, evolved into a winning “Lady Presidentess” and devoted caretaker in his dotage at Montpelier.
Stewart’s lively character sketches employ sprightly prose and impeccable research.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-1451688580
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Nov. 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2014
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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