A tense, richly detailed narrative of the American Revolution.
In 1781, discouraged after five years of war, George Washington finally saw the tide turn.
National Book Award winner Philbrick (Valiant Ambition: George Washington, Benedict Arnold, and the Fate of the American Revolution, 2016, etc.) reprises the protagonists of his last history of the War of Independence in a meticulously researched recounting of the events leading up to the colonists’ victory at the Battle of Yorktown. Focusing on naval and military strategy, Philbrick—like Tom Shachtman in How the French Saved America (2017)—reveals the critical contributions made by the French navy, a fleet that had improved substantially since its defeat by Britain in the Seven Years’ War. In France’s Académie de Marine, students were taught “to think of a naval battle in terms of a chess game rather than a brawl,” inciting, “for the first time in centuries, a whisper of doubt” in the “collective psyche of the British navy.” Although British commanders were determined to win, they were faced with passionate French military men, such as the young Marquis de Lafayette, the Comte de Grasse, and the Comte de Rochambeau, as well as recalcitrant colonists. British successes emboldened, rather than intimidated, patriots. “Broken up into thirteen largely self-sufficient entities,” the author asserts, “the United States was a segmented political organism that was almost impossible for the British army to kill.” However, American soldiers were in a weakened state, starving and unpaid. Washington, who had recently learned of Benedict Arnold’s betrayal, feared mutiny. But, Philbrick argues persuasively, Arnold’s treason actually strengthened the patriots’ resolve “by serving as a cautionary tale during one of the darkest periods of the war.” The author portrays Washington as an aggressive, undaunted leader—even when facing distressing personal problems—who emitted a “charismatic force field.” One British officer reported feeling “awestruck as if he was before something supernatural” in Washington’s presence. Philbrick, a sailor himself, recounts the strategic maneuvering involved in the many naval encounters: ships’ positions, wind direction and strength, and the “disorienting cloud of fire and smoke” that often imperiled the fleet.
A tense, richly detailed narrative of the American Revolution.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42676-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
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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