A lively, lucid, and opinionated history, and his research supports his skepticism on some historical claims. The book...
An exhaustive biography of the most controversial figure in Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet.
Lincoln’s secretary of war, Edwin Stanton (1814-1869) has not lacked historical attention. Already an expert on the president and his era, historian Stahr (Seward: Lincoln’s Indispensable Man, 2012, etc.) seems reluctant to leave out any piece of his expansive research, but readers will forgive him. A self-made lawyer and pugnacious litigator, Stanton was well-known by the 1850s. While previous historians have turned up anti-slavery credentials in Stanton’s life, Stahr is skeptical. He notes that Stanton was on friendly terms with national figures on both sides but remained loyal to the Democratic Party, which tried to remain neutral. In December 1860, President James Buchanan appointed him attorney general. The author dismisses efforts to portray Stanton as a hard-liner, placing him among those who tried, tactfully, to discourage the dithering president from giving away the store. He left office in March 1861 and returned as secretary of war in January 1862, when he efficiently oversaw an immense military effort. He was overbearing, widely detested, and prone to arresting officials and harassing newspapers for endangering the Union. When Lincoln was shot, he took charge. He remained in office under Andrew Johnson, who tried to fire him for refusing to withdraw troops from the South. After Johnson’s failed impeachment trial in 1868, Stanton resigned, dying the following year, days after the new president, Ulysses Grant, appointed him to the Supreme Court. Readers may prefer to skim lengthy quotes from speeches and letters in this massive tome, but they will agree that Stanton lived in exciting times. The author provides a chronology and 8-page cast of characters to help keep names and dates straight.
A lively, lucid, and opinionated history, and his research supports his skepticism on some historical claims. The book should be Stanton’s definitive biography for some time to come.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4767-3930-4
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
