A stirring, comprehensive life of the great Irish patriot. ``If you think you understand what's going on, you're just confused,'' says a graffito current in Belfast. The same is true of Irish history, a sprawling mess of tangled loyalties and shifting allegiances. The life of Michael Collins (18901922) exemplifies the tortured, bloody course of modern Irish history. A kindhearted and warm man who in his heyday cheerfully ordered the assassination of political and military opponents, Collins rose to international prominence as a leader of the Irish independence movement. He had first emerged as a leader during the Easter uprising of 1916, in which hundreds of combatants and civilians died, and which Collins later rued as an enterprise ``that was bungled terribly, costing many a good life.'' Mackay (Burns: A Biography of Robert Burns, 1993) carefully describes Collins's contributions to the Irish armed resistance movement against British rule, first as a guerrilla, and later as commanding general of the national army. Mackay is also good, for the most part, in recounting and analyzing the complex negotiations with England that led to the founding of the Irish Free State after a costly, vicious civil war in which Collins fell victim to a sniper's bullet. Collins's story cannot be told independently of that of his principal opponent, Eamon de Valera, who remarked after Collins's death, ``In the fullness of time history will record the greatness of Collins and it will be recorded at my expense.'' That much is true, but Mackay does not satisfactorily explore de Valera's character and motivations, and he remains a shadowy and somewhat sinister force. Neither does Mackay deal sufficiently with the charge of other historians that de Valera ordered Collins's assassination. He concludes, probably correctly, that the ambush in which Collins died was not intended specifically for him. Despite minor shortcomings, this is the best life of Collins now available, published just in time to coincide with Neil Jordan's film Michael Collins, with Liam Neeson in the lead role.
Pub Date: Jan. 15, 1997
ISBN: 1-85158-857-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Mainstream/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1996
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 2025 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.
