Fascinating scholarship from Zeitz, who knows how to present history to an audience of nonspecialists.
Zeitz (Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern, 2006, etc.) approaches the already overloaded realm of Abraham Lincoln studies from a fresh direction.
John Nicolay (1832–1901) and John Hay (1838–1905) were young, intelligent, ambitious men who became acquainted with Lincoln during his pre-presidential years in Springfield, Ill. When Lincoln shifted from obscure Illinois lawyer-legislator to the presidency within a four-year span, Nicolay and Hay became the key members of his staff, controlling access to him in the White House, drafting policy memos, traveling with him around the nation and attending to many of his personal needs. During the Civil War, Nicolay and Hay knew more about Lincoln's thoughts and actions than anybody else. After the assassination, they had to figure out what to reveal about the president they considered a great patriot and in what form to do the revealing. Both experienced distinguished careers inside and outside government, married happily and raised families, but they knew implicitly that they would have to face up to the task of extending the Lincoln legacy. The result: two decades of extensive research with unparalleled access to Lincoln's personal and presidential papers, culminating in a 10-volume, admiring biography. Zeitz does a masterful job delineating the lives of Nicolay and Hay, explaining their roles in political contests, narrating their interactions with Lincoln and placing the Nicolay-Hay biography within the larger context of Lincoln studies. The author is mostly admiring of Nicolay and Hay, while simultaneously factoring in their biases in the service of American history. Readers will quite likely realize the vital role of the massive biography in understanding the seemingly simple man who became a complicated national touchstone.
Fascinating scholarship from Zeitz, who knows how to present history to an audience of nonspecialists.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-670-02566-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
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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