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AMERICAN REBELS

HOW THE HANCOCK, ADAMS, AND QUINCY FAMILIES FANNED THE FLAMES OF REVOLUTION

An occasionally enlightening study hampered by the author’s missteps.

A look at the road to the American Revolution from the perspectives of five patriots.

On July 2, 1776, the Second Continental Congress, presided over by John Hancock, declared independence from Britain, prompting delegate John Adams to write to his wife, Abigail, that the “Second Day of July 1776, will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America.” This moment provides a fitting conclusion to this book, in which Sankovitch (The Lowells of Massachusetts: An American Family, 2017, etc.) argues that Hancock, the Adamses, Josiah Quincy Jr., and Dorothy Quincy Hancock together “led the fight for liberty” that culminated in the Revolution. John Hancock, John Adams, and Edmund and Samuel Quincy were childhood companions, the “Boys from Braintree” who attended Harvard together. In the years following the French and Indian War, Hancock, Adams, and Josiah often collaborated in response to British Colonial policies. Hancock and Quincy worked on an official protest against the Stamp Act, Adams was Hancock’s defense counsel in the Liberty case, and Hancock and Quincy helped organize the Boston Tea Party. Sankovitch persuasively claims the importance of the somewhat forgotten Josiah, a brilliant lawyer who succumbed to tuberculosis in April 1775 at the age of 31. She is less convincing in asserting the significance of Abigail Smith Adams and Dorothy Quincy Hancock. The author also commits too many factual errors: The Puritans were not separatists. Thomas Hutchinson was not the governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay in August 1765. The committee charged with writing the Declaration of Independence consisted of five men, not six. John Adams was elected president in 1796, not 1797. Sankovitch also contradicts herself when she notes that Abigail Adams anticipated war with Britain (“inevitable, in her view”) after the Boston Tea Party only to write that she and others thought war was “still unthinkable” after that event.

An occasionally enlightening study hampered by the author’s missteps.

Pub Date: March 24, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-250-16328-8

Page Count: 416

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

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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