A discerning history of pre-Revolutionary America and the man who shaped its future.
As a young man, the eminent Founding Father was impetuous, thin-skinned, and prone to anger and paranoia.
“Perhaps the strongest feature in his character was prudence,” Thomas Jefferson remarked about the venerable Washington (1732-1799). Abigail Adams described him as “dignity with ease,” and her husband, John Adams, noted his “great self-command.” But as Outside correspondent Stark (Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire: A Story of Wealth, Ambition, and Survival, 2014, etc.) portrays him in his lively, well-researched biography, Washington in his 20s was far different: “ambitious, temperamental, vain,” and stubborn. “When thwarted,” he was quick to erupt in “explosive anger.” Acutely sensitive to any “threat to his honor or pride,” his first reaction was to quit. Born into a family that never rose above “the second tier” of Virginia society, Washington coveted status and wealth, looking to military command as a way to gain acceptance by the Colonial elite. His goal—never realized—was to be awarded a commission by the king. Stark follows Washington’s career as he rose from part-time junior officer, serving Virginia Gov. Robert Dinwiddie, to colonel, overseeing motley, undisciplined, underfunded soldiers. The author conveys in gritty detail the challenges of 18th-century conflict: an untamed frontier, violent Indians, chigger attacks, torrential rains, lack of food and arms, dysentery, and deserters. Tasked with preventing the French incursion into the Ohio Valley, Washington failed spectacularly; inexperienced in military strategy, he “watched dumbfounded in horror” as Indians who agreed to aid his troops fell murderously upon French soldiers, slicing off their scalps as trophies. The bloody massacre, Stark asserts, led to the protracted French and Indian War. Nevertheless, in 1755, after he bravely aided a wounded British general, Washington earned a reputation as a fearless hero. Just as significant, he came to believe that he was protected by divine forces, “for some greater purpose.” Gradually realizing his responsibility to protect vulnerable settlers, he grew in empathy, selflessness, and determination to serve others.
A discerning history of pre-Revolutionary America and the man who shaped its future.Pub Date: May 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-241606-3
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 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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