Fine slice of American military and revolutionary history—good for commodores in the making, too.
Sturdy, seaworthy life of the Scottish-born hero of the American Revolution, whom John Adams characterized as “the most ambitious and intriguing officer in the American Navy.”
Jones, already a legend in his early 30s thanks to his daring exploits aboard the Bonhomme Richard, wasn’t exactly forgotten at the end of the Revolution, although he felt ill-used when Congress ignored his offer to establish a naval academy and make America a maritime power and instead auctioned off the Continental Navy’s few surviving frigates. He was given to mercurial moods and feelings of persecution anyway, writes Newsweek assistant managing editor Thomas (Robert Kennedy, 2000, etc.), very much like his contemporary Benedict Arnold, whom Thomas considers to have been Jones’s “closest rival . . . for drive and resourcefulness”—adding that “unlike Arnold, Jones remained steadfast to the American cause,” though both complained about official indifference to their brilliance and about “commands offered and withdrawn.” Jones therefore stalked off to Paris after the war against England, where he nursed his wounds before finding work as an admiral in the navy of the Russian tsarina Catherine the Great. There, he found himself embroiled in political intrigues of many kinds, though his undoing would prove to be an unseemly encounter with a 12-year-old girl that naturally enough, “left him vulnerable to scandal.” Shunned and disgraced, he returned to Paris, where he died in 1792 at the age of 45—just a few days, ironically enough, before a commission arrived from Congress for him to go and have sharp words with the Dey of Algiers about the matter of the Barbary Pirates. Thomas’s account of these events—and whether Jones ever really said “I have not yet begun to fight”—is skillfully rendered, and his blend of period detail and modern psychobiography just right for the job.
Fine slice of American military and revolutionary history—good for commodores in the making, too.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7432-0583-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2003
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 2026 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.
