An aptly subtitled biography of the trailblazing political polemicist: This detailed account finds virtually no trace of a personal life. After his wife's death in childbirth in 1760, argues Keane (Politics/Polytechnic of Central London), Paine (17371809) reserved his primary passion for politics; his jobs as a corsetmaker and an exciseman in rigid, hierarchical England only sharpened his sense of economic and social injustice. The American colonies, seething on the brink of revolt when he arrived in 1774, were ripe for ``someone who supposed, with immense seriousness, that in politics words count.'' Common Sense, his blast against British rule in particular and monarchy in general, was deliberately written in plain language accessible to those previously excluded from political discourse; it outsold any other pamphlet ever published in the colonies and shaped the course of the American Revolution. It was Paine's ability to speak to the common people, as much as what he said, that made authorities of every stripe nervous: He gradually lost favor in more conservative, post-revolutionary America; his return to England climaxed with the 1791 publication of The Rights of Man, a work so radically democratic he was charged with seditious libel and forced to flee the country; in revolutionary France, he narrowly escaped execution during the Reign of Terror when he proved as allergic to state despotism of the left as of the right. The Age of Reason, written during those dark days as an attempt to define his militantly nonsectarian religious beliefs, ensured that Paine was damned as an atheist when he went back to America; the poignant final chapters show him, sick and abandoned by all but a few friends, still churning out pamphlets to guide the nation that now scorned him. Nothing really new here (despite occasional sniping at minor errors by previous Paine biographers) but a solid, well-written portrait that reiterates Paine's ongoing importance in contemporary discussions of democracy's potential and perils.
Pub Date: March 6, 1995
ISBN: 0-316-48419-9
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1995
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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