An illuminating companion to Walter Isaacson’s Benjamin Franklin (2003) and other recent studies that cast the Founder in a...
A reluctant revolutionary? A French wannabe? A portrait of Ben Franklin in a decidedly contrarian—though careful—bit of revisionism.
“Although he may have eventually become the supreme symbol of America,” writes Wood (History/Brown Univ.; The Radicalism of the American Revolution, 1992, etc.), “he was certainly not the most American of the Founders during his lifetime. Indeed, one might more easily describe him as the least American and the most European of the nation’s early leaders.” This was not only because most of Franklin’s commercial and intellectual ties were with London, but also because he inclined, early on, to a somewhat aristocratic view of human affairs, sniffing at those who had to make a mere living and enjoying gentlemanly pursuits. So upper-crust English was he by temperament that Franklin relocated to England in the late 1750s and proceeded to write his American friends letters about the blessings of London for anyone with a brain: the city enjoyed “in every Neighbourhood, more sensible, virtuous and elegant Minds, than we can collect in ranging 100 Leagues of our vast Forests.” Franklin offered to pay the losses caused by the Boston Tea Party out of his own pocket, and he pressed for an English–American Act of Union that would forever bond the two. Yet something happened in England—something about which Wood offers intriguing guesses—so that Franklin returned to America convinced of the justice of the revolutionary cause: “What impressed most delegates” to the Continental Congress, Wood writes, “was the intensity of Franklin’s commitment to the patriot cause. He seemed deeply angry at the Crown and British officialdom and was impatient with all efforts at reconciliation.” He committed himself to that revolution even as other Founders suspected him of being a fair-weather friend, at considerable personal danger. Even so, he moved to Paris almost as soon as the war was over, and “the nearly eight years that Franklin spent in France were the happiest of his life,” far away from the postcolonial crowd.
An illuminating companion to Walter Isaacson’s Benjamin Franklin (2003) and other recent studies that cast the Founder in a new light.Pub Date: May 24, 2004
ISBN: 1-59420-019-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2004
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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