Brookhiser might have done more to examine the text with an eye to that question, but this remains a balanced and thoroughly...
Third in National Review senior editor Brookhiser’s series on the heroes of the American Revolution (Founding Father, 1996; Alexander Hamilton, American, 1999).
Gouverneur Morris was less celebrated in his own day than either Hamilton or Washington, but not for want of trying: he had an endlessly high regard for himself, chased women on two continents, led a life of wealth and influence before and after the Revolution (the seat of his family estate stretched from the Harlem River to Long Island Sound, and as a lawyer he commonly earned fees of $10,000 a pop), and was altogether satisfied with his abilities and accomplishments. The scion of French Huguenot and Dutch forebears, Morris enjoyed an aristocratic heritage that “represented something that existed nowhere else in the Thirteen Colonies [but New York]—an old world of European settlement that preceded the arrival of Englishmen.” For all that, Morris was quick to choose the Continental side when the war came, and unwavering in his devotion to the American cause. Although his leanings were fundamentally conservative, Morris championed religious freedom, disagreeing with fellow Federalist John Jay that “Americans were a united people . . . professing one religion”—which, Brookhiser points out, meant not Christianity but Protestantism—and holding vigorously that “matters of conscience and faith, whether political or religious, are as much out of the province, as they are beyond the ken of human legislatures.” Brookhiser also asserts, intriguingly, that Morris mistrusted democracy and favored national over states’ rights—and that he foresaw the Civil War as early as 1812, when he urged New York and New England to break away from the slaveholding states. As the lead author of the Constitution, Morris had ample opportunity to insert his views on such matters.
Brookhiser might have done more to examine the text with an eye to that question, but this remains a balanced and thoroughly interesting study of the man and his time all the same.Pub Date: June 3, 2003
ISBN: 0-7432-2379-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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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