A sturdy and readable life, in company with Randall’s other portraits of the Revolutionary generation.
A revealing but measured biography of the younger Founding Father, who, to the horror of libertarians ever since, “[drew] up a blueprint for a relationship between government and money.”
Who was right about America—Jefferson or Hamilton? Such, writes Randall (Humanities/ Champlain Coll., Vermont; co-author, Forgotten Americans, 1998, etc.), was the single question leveled at him at a meeting of the American Revolution Round Table a few years back. “The hour was late,” he writes, “my answer brief: Jefferson for the eighteenth century, Hamilton for more modern times.” He capably defends his judgment in this well-written life of Hamilton (1755–1804), who mixed Clintonesque appetites for pleasure and policy-wonking while busily putting the new republic’s economy on a sound footing. Hamilton’s life was wreathed in legend even in his time; more or less adopted by George Washington, he also had a talent for acquiring powerful enemies who made every effort to discredit the young man as a bastard, a closet royalist, and an enemy of democracy. Randall defends his subject on all counts; to be sure, he notes, Hamilton’s parents were not technically married, but “they lived as husband and wife for fifteen years,” which was good enough in the eyes of English common law; to be sure, he carried himself with the air of an aristocrat, but Hamilton was no fan of the Hanoverian kings, and if he showed unusual clemency to captured Loyalists, he remained a devoted soldier of the Continental Army all the same, ardently espousing the cause of liberty. Unlike more idealistic revolutionaries, however, Hamilton believed that the chief role of government was to subdue the passions of the people, who “are inherently corrupted by lust for power and greed for property,” which put him square up against the Jeffersonian camp and, in time, in the sights of Aaron Burr’s pistol. But before he fell, Hamilton crafted several institutions—among them the national bank and the germ of the IRS—that prove him a modern man indeed, for better or worse.
A sturdy and readable life, in company with Randall’s other portraits of the Revolutionary generation.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-019549-5
Page Count: 480
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2002
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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