A proficient, readable life, though McGrath does not convincingly explain why a new biography on Monroe is necessary now.
The life of “the last Founding Father to hold the presidency.”
In this deliberative take on Monroe (1758-1831), McGrath, a two-time winner of the Commodore John Barry Book Award, mines the Revolutionary and post-1812 eras, concentrating on Monroe’s two-term presidency. A mentee of Thomas Jefferson and Revolutionary War hero in his home state of Virginia, Monroe served as a delegate on the Continental Congress and notably voted against the ratification of the Constitution. He was partly embroiled in the revelation of Alexander Hamilton’s being blackmailed for his affair with Maria Reynolds—did Monroe reveal it to Jefferson? The bad blood would nearly cause them to fight a duel a few years later. As the author shows, Monroe certainly helped stoke the political animosity between Jefferson’s supporters and Hamilton’s Federalists. Serving as George Washington’s ambassador to France when the mood in Paris was still dangerously revolutionary, Monroe was recalled due to his handling of the Jay Treaty, and his veneration of Washington was deeply shaken. McGrath follows Monroe from his time as governor of Virginia to his role as Jefferson’s envoy in negotiating the Louisiana Purchase. Later, he served as James Madison’s secretary of state and secretary of war, at the same time, while war with Britain raged. As president, he was able to defuse political tensions between the parties, and the Federalists were neutralized. Under his tenure, “he sought an Indian policy that would please both white and Native Americans, and came up woefully short,” and he freed only one of his more than 200 slaves. McGrath, whose wide-ranging research is evident from the extensive list of primary sources, considers Monroe's legacy as “put[ting] his country on the world stage, for better and worse, for all time.” It’s a sturdy, straightforward text that will appeal to fans of presidential biographies, if not general readers.
A proficient, readable life, though McGrath does not convincingly explain why a new biography on Monroe is necessary now.Pub Date: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-451-47726-2
Page Count: 736
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
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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