HENRY ADAMS AND THE MAKING OF AMERICA

Name: HENRY ADAMS AND THE MAKING OF AMERICA
Author: Garry Wills
ISBN: 0-618-13430-1

by Garry Wills ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 14, 2005

It seemed like a great match: one historian fascinated by the paradoxes of power writing about a great predecessor. But...

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Wills (The Rosary, 2005, etc.) may have attempted something beyond even his considerable powers in this overly ambitious examination of the great American historian Henry Adams (1838–1918).

When remembered at all, Adams’s multi-volume, epic history of the administrations of Jefferson and Madison, collectively referred to here as the History, has been criticized (notably by historian Richard Hofstadter) for its negativity. Wills argues that this is a willful misreading derived from considering only the works’ first chapters, which focus on the largely unformed America of 1800. Moreover, Adams’s The Education of Henry Adams looms so large in the Adams canon that all his other works are subsumed in its penumbra of pessimism. Though righting the balance by underscoring Adams’s essential nationalism and optimism, Wills unnecessarily bogs down his analysis with a long recapitulation of his subject’s narrative. In the first third of his book, Wills discusses the elements that prepared Adams to write his masterpiece, including a fascination with the South and extensive travel. Rebutting the charge that Adams was continuing longstanding family feuds with the Democratic-Republicans, Wills convincingly points out that this great-grandson and grandson of Presidents John and John Quincy sometimes displayed hostility to his fabled forebears. And he makes a great case that Adams’s epic is a “nonfiction prose masterpiece of the nineteenth century in America,” one that pioneered the use of foreign and domestic archival sources, blended intellectual, military, diplomatic and economic history, and distilled it all in a richly ironic voice. Ultimately, however, in the last two-thirds of this book, Wills merely covers the same ground as Adams, and pulls from his own “Negro President”and James Madison.

It seemed like a great match: one historian fascinated by the paradoxes of power writing about a great predecessor. But Wills loses his focus—and, oddly enough, even his own familiar provocative voice.

Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2005

ISBN: 0-618-13430-1

Page Count: 448

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

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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.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.