An elegant overview of the life of this nation's founding father. Brookhiser (The Way of the WASP, 1990), a senior editor at the National Review, examines George Washington's career as military man, politician, and citizen. Brookhiser notes that Washington became something of a myth in his own time (in 1776, a town in western Massachusetts renamed itself in his honor, and post-revolutionary babies throughout the US were christened after him) and that this mythic status has made it difficult for us to appreciate the man. It doesn't help matters, Brookhiser continues, that Washington was extraordinarily reserved; the author cannot help taking digs at ``kinder, gentler presidents who feel our pain'' in the light of the first president's careful modesty. Other biographers have painted fuller pictures of George Washington, but this slender book is a worthy appreciation in its own right. The author runs freely with small details that, on examination, tell us much about Washington's greatness; he sidestepped, for instance, the call to become king of the new nation in the face of widespread popular appeal for a homegrown monarch, and against much resistance in the Constitutional Convention he held out for federal authority to veto state laws that were unconstitutional. Of special interest is Brookhiser's analysis of the two chief crises of Washington's presidential career, namely the Whiskey Rebellion and the struggle to ratify Jay's Treaty with England; the former illustrates Washington's wise exercise of both restraint and force as necessary, and the latter shows his understanding of the role of a small, new nation in international politics. Brookhiser's only missteps, and they are rare indeed, are in the direction of psychobiography; to understand Washington, it does not help much to remark that ``a sense of latent anger, of suppressed force, can be an aspect of courage.'' A well-placed attempt to put George Washington once again ``first in the hearts of his countrymen.''
Pub Date: Feb. 22, 1996
ISBN: 0-684-82291-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1995
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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