Brady’s melodious account rarely digs beneath the official line in the lives of these two strong characters.
A scandalous marriage proves Old Hickory’s political scourge and emotional rock in this uncomplicated, accessible biography of the Jacksons.
Rachel Donelson and her family were early settlers to the newly opened-up frontier of Tennessee, then Kentucky, purchasing a large tract of land near Harrodsburg. Her early marriage to Capt. Lewis Robards in 1785 swiftly turned sour. Rachel was “a girl of spirit,” writes New Orleans–based historian Brady (Martha Washington: An American Life, 2005, etc.), and her new husband was jealous. A few years into her marriage, Rachel met Andrew Jackson, a fledgling lawyer from North Carolina who had gone West like many other brash, determined young men seeking their fortune. The couple eloped to Natchez, Miss., where they claimed to be married—yet Rachel was not yet divorced. This obfuscation would haunt Jackson’s career, especially when he ran for president in 1824. However, it was by all accounts a sweet match, as Brady demonstrates through Jackson’s ardent letters dispatched during his frequent absences from his wife. He moved from being attorney to attorney general, Tennessee state delegate, congressman, senator and governor of Florida, all while Rachel was largely left alone to run the house and farm. As Jackson’s star rose in the military, Rachel remained childless, stout, Presbyterian and capable, fond of smoking her pipe and supervising their growing homestead near Nashville, christened the Hermitage, for the next 17 years. Despite his reputation for violence, dueling and Wild West expansionism, Jackson was a great favorite of the public, and while he narrowly lost the 1824 election to John Quincy Adams, he gained the White House four years later. Rachel, sadly, would not live long enough to attend his inauguration.
Brady’s melodious account rarely digs beneath the official line in the lives of these two strong characters.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-230-60950-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2010
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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