A well-honed work of driving focus, particularly timely in this new era of economic inequality.
The acclaimed Lincoln scholar and an economist make the argument that Abraham Lincoln worked tirelessly to maintain economic opportunity for all people—a “right to rise” concept that has been sacred to politicians from then to the present.
Lincoln wasn’t exactly an abolitionist, write Holzer (Lincoln and the Power of the Press, 2014, etc.) and Garfinkle (Future of American Democracy Foundation), but he envisioned that all Americans could embrace the “American dream,” from rags to riches as he had—even African-Americans. The authors concentrate their study on evidence of speeches and acts of Lincoln’s presidency that demonstrated his pursuit of “economic opportunity for the widest possible circle of hardworking Americans.” Lincoln hoped to extend Northern middle-class society into the new territories, and he abhorred the Southern aristocratic mindset that was opposed to social mobility through tariffs and internal improvements—e.g., public investment in infrastructure. New Western territories were, for Lincoln, meant for poor whites to “go and better their condition” and not for the spread of an institution, though protected by the Constitution, that restricted social mobility and depressed wages. The authors carefully sift Lincoln’s speeches, beginning in 1854 with his shrewd political calculation that restricting slavery in the Western territories would mean that at some point in the near future, the “slow but sure arrival of an ever-growing western anti-slavery bloc” would spell the end of slavery in Congress. Time was on Lincoln’s side, and he recognized that the nation “will become all one thing or all the other.” Moreover, he used his own autobiography to sell the “self-made man” story, as the poor farmer’s son who had scant education but huge motivation to better himself. In the second half of this compelling study, Holzer and Garfinkle trace how subsequent presidents managed this vastly changing postwar economic system and the shift from independent artisans to mills and factories.
A well-honed work of driving focus, particularly timely in this new era of economic inequality.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-465-02830-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 8, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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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