A deeply researched, recondite, occasionally mind-scrambling maze of familial relations and historical detail.
A study of the devolution of America’s first dynasty as it reflected the nation’s increasingly democratic and unruly dynamic.
American history scholar Egerton (History/Le Moyne Coll.; Thunder at the Gates: The Black Civil War Regiments That Redeemed America, 2016, etc.) delves deeply into the third, fourth, and fifth generations of the Adams, finding them more “cripple[ed]” than entitled by the legacy of the great Revolutionary hero and second president, John Adams, and even that of his illustrious son, John Quincy Adams, who served both as president and anti-slavery congressman. As the author discovered while wading through vast amounts of research material—the dense narrative, packed with layered family detail, will lose some readers—the problem was that the Adams “progeny grew up aware of the perfectionist standards demanded of them, but equally mindful of their failures to reach those goals.” Alcoholism plagued several of the promising youth—e.g., John Quincy’s two brothers, Charles and Thomas—as well as those of the next generation, including two of John Quincy’s sons—George and John II—who both died as young men. The one son of John Quincy to carry on valiantly into Victorian responsibility was Charles Francis (Sr.), who was elected to Congress yet never captured the presidency; he also served on the court of St. James in London during the Civil War. His sons were a motley assortment: Charles Francis Jr. enlisted on the Northern side of the war out of familial obligation, but he expressed dismaying racist views. John Quincy II was the first to abandon the Republican Party for the Democratic Party “because of his disaffection for Reconstruction reforms.” Henry, rather more versatile, served as his father’s secretary in London and became a notable journalist and historian. As for the women of the family, many were gifted, yet most were thwarted. Thankfully, Egerton provides a family tree, which readers will want to keep handy.
A deeply researched, recondite, occasionally mind-scrambling maze of familial relations and historical detail.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-465-09388-5
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 6, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 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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