A colorful, richly detailed overture to Lincoln’s odyssey.
On Feb. 11, 1861, three weeks before his inauguration, President-Elect Abraham Lincoln boarded a train for Washington, D.C. This lively account describes that eventful journey.
“Lincoln’s safe delivery,” writes Widmer, “would become, over the next thirteen days, a powerful symbol for the survival of democracy in America. As he traveled his circuitous route, Lincoln carried the aspirations of millions on his shoulders. Around the country, they were waiting for him.” No one doubted the occasion’s historical significance, so the train overflowed with reporters, officials, friends, and fans. The author describes Lincoln’s wandering, 1,900-mile journey, with well-wishers lining the tracks and huge crowds whose members clamored to shake his hand and hear a speech. Not every speech was memorable, nor were the many encounters, mishaps, and demonstrations, so Widmer wisely cuts away to deliver histories of the cities and states along the route, their citizens’ reactions to the impending crisis (multiple states had already seceded from the Union), and the impressions of witnesses. Plenty of Southern sympathizers proclaimed murderous intentions, and newspapers published breathless reports of hidden bombs, efforts to sabotage the rails, and cabals of sharpshooters. Concerned railroad officials called on Alan Pinkerton, head of the famous detective agency, whose operatives swarmed over the route and reported numerous plots to harm Lincoln. Widmer is not certain if any competent assassins were at work, but Pinkerton and rail officials had no doubt. They convinced a reluctant Lincoln to depart from his schedule at the end of his trip and travel incognito through Maryland to Washington on an ordinary passenger train. This passed without incident, but news of the furtive journey produced an avalanche of bad publicity before greater events took over. While general readers may lose interest during the journey, Lincoln buffs will undoubtedly devour the book.
A colorful, richly detailed overture to Lincoln’s odyssey.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4767-3943-4
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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