A middling biography of a worthy subject.
The life of Mrs. Alexander Hamilton.
When Eliza Schuyler (1757-1854) first met Alexander Hamilton, writes Mazzeo (English/Colby Coll.; Irena's Children: The Extraordinary Story of the Woman Who Saved 2,500 Children from the Warsaw Ghetto, 2016, etc.), “it was not love at first sight.” But at a second meeting, “the spark between them was instantaneous.” So began the relationship that would give Eliza her most enduring identity as the wife of a dueling Founding Father. The center of this biography is the affair Alexander confessed to having with Maria Reynolds. There has always been debate about the affair: Did it really happen, or did Alexander, who was Secretary of the Treasury at the time, invent the adulterous liaison to distract from more damaging rumors that he was committing insider trading? Despite the scandal, Mazzeo’s Eliza appears stoic, loyal, and canny. Indeed, the author argues compellingly that what we know about Eliza’s character suggests that the affair was a ruse. According to Mazzeo, Eliza stood by her man not because she was weak but because she was committed to protecting her family from the more serious downfall that would occur were Alexander found guilty of fraud. The narrative tends toward mostly charming yet sometimes flat vignettes—e.g., President George Washington sitting in Eliza’s parlor and watching the Hamilton kids play. Describing Eliza and Alexander’s wedding, Mazzeo casually mentions “family slaves…unwrapping a wedding cake,” but she devotes far more attention to the cake than to the Schuylers’ use of enslaved labor. The prose is by turns trite (“Eliza would bury another part of her heart there in the graveyard”) and breathless (“What happened next would change everything in her life and in her marriage and would force Eliza into making an agonizing decision”). The author devotes a scant 53 pages to the half-century after Alexander’s death. Readers may wish for a more detailed treatment of Eliza’s work, as a widow, with New York’s Orphan Asylum Society.
A middling biography of a worthy subject.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6630-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 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
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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