An exceptionally thorough and thoughtful account of a spectacular career that helped shape and reflect national...
Beautifully written biography of America’s one best-known preacher, who ingeniously transformed the harsh Calvinism of his famous father into a nurturing, middlebrow faith attractive and accessible to a country prepared to abandon Puritan orthodoxy.
If Henry Ward Beecher (1813–87) is remembered at all today, it’s for a notorious adultery trial near the end of his life. American historian Applegate reminds us, however, that at the height of his career, the likes of Emerson, Whitman, Lincoln and Twain each assumed upon meeting him that Beecher was the greater man. Well-grounded in New England’s doctrinal theology by his father Lyman, “the last great Puritan minister in America,” Henry was disciplined by the competition within his large, talented family (Harriet Beecher Stowe was his sister). After acquiring seasoning from his early pastoral postings in America’s rough west, Beecher brought his dramatic, emotional religious oratory to Plymouth Church in Brooklyn Heights, which he transformed into a tourist attraction. As a traveling lecturer, a popular contributor to newspapers and magazines and even a novelist, he reached millions worldwide. Though a thoroughgoing member of the Establishment, he was also a moderate advocate of certain progressive views (abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage); similarly, his updated version of Christianity made him seem both cutting-edge and reassuring. Beecher’s fame exceeded that of all but a few men of his time, but Applegate’s sensitive, finely calibrated debut suggests that had he not been Lyman’s son, Henry would have chosen a role other than Moral Authority of the Gilded Age. Addicted to the rush of stardom, later to mammon, and throughout his life to the charms of the many women who were entranced by him, Beecher’s eventual fall reverberated throughout the country.
An exceptionally thorough and thoughtful account of a spectacular career that helped shape and reflect national preoccupations before, during and after the Civil War.Pub Date: June 27, 2006
ISBN: 0-385-51396-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
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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