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In a meditative and discursive essay (mostly about its subject's long retirement), Ellis (History/Mount Holyoke; After the Revolution, 1979) ponders the distinctive personality and achievements of America's endearingly cantankerous second President. While generally accorded a distinguished place in the pantheon of the nation's founders, John Adams has never been credited with the intellect of a Jefferson or the heroism of a Washington, and his presidency usually has been deemed an honorable failure. Ellis views this as unjust but points out a possible reason: Adams's pragmatic and pessimistic philosophy (emphasizing the limitations of America and the importance of tempering freedom with responsibility) was less moving than the idealistic, celebratory outlook of Jefferson and less appropriate to a young nation about to conquer a continent. Adams's rhetoric, moreover—at best plain and uninspired and at worst vituperatively argumentative—suffers in comparison with Jefferson's majestic prose. Ellis nonetheless makes clear that Adams has much to teach modern America, which has discovered limits to its power and is beginning to doubt the myths of American exceptionalism. The author's vivid sketch of the famous Adams-Jefferson correspondence shows his subject's delightful personality, intellect, warmth, and capacity for friendship, as well as his devotion to the Union and to the Federalist cause (which came to an end with the New England Federalists' support for secession during the War of 1812). Ellis comments ruefully on what he views as Adams's unfair relegation to second place in America's memory of its founders (a ranking that Adams himself anticipated), and he proposes that a statue of Adams be erected near the Jefferson Memorial so that, ``depending on the time of day and angle of the sun, he and Jefferson might take turns casting shadows across each other's facades.'' By focusing on Adams's retirement, Ellis doesn't achieve the sweep of a full biography—but he's able to capture the man's appealing spirit, providing new perspective on an unfairly neglected Founding Father. (Photographs)
None NonePub Date: May 10, 1993
ISBN: 0-393-03479-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1993
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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