Mackay, a Scottish historian whose previous works include a biography of fellow Scot Robert Burns (1993), turns his attention to another Glaswegian, Allan Pinkerton. Pinkerton is best remembered as the founder of the private- detective agency that still bears his name. When he started the agency in Chicago in 1850, it had a staff of two; today it has a staff of thousands, with offices around the world. Pinkerton, who was born in 1819, was early left fatherless; as an adolescent he became a cooper's apprentice. His skill as a barrelmaker would be matched by his rapid rise in the ranks of radical politics, where he became prominent in the Scottish branch of the Chartist movement. Undoubtedly, his controversial past led in part to his decision to emigrate to America in 1842. Pinkerton and his wife, Joan, made their way to Illinois, settling near the budding city of Chicago. Scouting a seemingly deserted island for wood, Pinkerton came upon a mysterious campfire that led him to a counterfeiting ring. Soon after, he was appointed deputy sheriff of Cook County, and his career in law enforcement was underway. Eventually, he would become head of intelligence for General George McClellan and a key figure in Civil War history. It is in his treatment of the Civil War period, fully a third of the book, that Mackay falls down grievously. Too much of his time is spent in spirited special pleading for McClellan and a defense of Pinkerton's reputation. Mackay is, however, astute in his assessment of the relationship between the growth of Pinkerton's private agency and the railroad industry. After the war Pinkerton was involved in a number of notorious cases, including attempts to bring the James gang to trial and to suppress the Molly Maguires, a secret organization active in the Pennsylvania coalfields. More hagiography than biography, this rather lifeless narrative hardly represents a balanced portrayal of a controversial figure.
Pub Date: Sept. 19, 1997
ISBN: 0-471-19415-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Wiley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1997
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
