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
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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