Brilliantly written account of the 18th-century nobleman was a key player in British naval strategy during the War of Independence—and who invented our favorite fast food. The fourth Earl of Sandwich (1718-92) is usually written off as the archetypal wicked aristocrat: a self-seeker who neglected his country's interest in the pursuit of the pleasures of the bedroom and the gaming table. Here, British naval historian Rodger- -drawing on a wide range of sources, including Sandwich's own letters and papers—attempts to go beyond this caricature by viewing his subject in the context of the realities of 18th-century party politics and naval warfare. His Sandwich emerges as an ambitious man with many interests and talents but little wealth—a man who consequently was distrusted by his own class and failed to achieve full scope for his powers. His beloved wife went insane, and the mistress he subsequently took was murdered. As First Sea Lord, Sandwich began a fundamental reform of the fleet, making use of seasoned timber and the latest technique of sheathing ships' bottoms with copper to improved speed—but the American Revolution interrupted these plans. Rodger argues that Sandwich's strategy in that war made sense in terms of contemporary presuppositions and the limitations of a Britain under attack from France and Spain: The 13 colonies were lost but Quebec and the West Indies were retained and, above all, the homeland was saved from invasion. Today, Sandwich is best remembered for his part in the revival and continued popularity of Handel's music—and for sandwiches. A pleasure to read—and offering new depth and insights into the political and social values of a critical epoch. (Illustrations)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-393-03587-5
Page Count: 425
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1993
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
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