A sturdy, instructive biography of the “first of the Founding Fathers to call for independence, first to call for union, and...
In public awareness, Richard Henry Lee (1732-1794) has slipped into the cracks of historical anonymity; this book pulls him back into the light.
Historian Unger, who has published frequently about the Founding Fathers (Henry Clay: America’s Greatest Statesman, 2015, etc.), returns with a generous, well-documented account of the life of Lee, focusing on his varied roles in the birth of the United States. He served in the Continental Congress, was among the first U.S. senators (appointed in his day, not elected), and was instrumental, as Unger shows, in the addition of the Bill of Rights to the Constitution. Lee was not a fan of the latter document—he feared federal overreach—but he later mellowed. The author rehearses the Revolutionary War, revisiting significant moments but always with an eye on Lee, a noncombatant: what were his responsibilities, how did he carry them out, with whom was he corresponding? Lee was friends with most of the significant figures of the time—Washington, Jefferson, Madison et al.—though those friendships waxed and waned as situations changed. Although Unger does not especially focus on these men as entitled, white, Christian, slave-owning males, neither does he neglect the subject. He notes, for example, that the first Senate comprised the richest white male property-owners in the country, and all of them abhorred taxes. The author also astutely reminds us that unifying for the Revolution and for the Constitution was an extremely difficult and complex business. Tempers flared, and civil war lay barely below the surface. It took the fierce determination of a few—and quite a bit of good fortune—to forge the documents that we now revere. At times, Unger can’t resist using superlatives, but, considering what ensued, who can blame him?
A sturdy, instructive biography of the “first of the Founding Fathers to call for independence, first to call for union, and first to call for a bill of rights.”Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-306-82561-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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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