A comprehensive biography of the Confederate guerrilla leader (1833—1916), with an emphasis on his Civil War exploits. Ramage’s (History/Northern Kentucky Univ.; Rebel Raider: The Life of General John Hunt Morgan, not reviewed) well-documented volume charts the progress of Mosby from a boyhood victim of playground bullies to an icon of the Confederacy. Proceeding in fairly chronological fashion, Ramage focuses on Mosby’s stunning career as a guerrilla leader, a man who was shot several times (once in the groin—the bullet remained in his body), who quoted Lord Byron while he harassed the Union troops relentlessly despite repeated attempts to capture or kill him. Ramage is most at ease in these sections, moving steadily (if unspectacularly) through descriptions of strategies and firefights that generally end with Mosby’s men stealing Union horses and supplies (which they divided among themselves), killing enemy soldiers, and disappearing into the woods like, well, gray ghosts. The author credits Mosby with innovations in guerrilla strategy (e.g., in close combat, his cavalry used two handguns each instead of the traditional saber) and more than once characterizes him as “one of the most brilliant minds in the history of guerrilla war.” The final 66 pages deal with Mosby’s long post—Civil War life. He was, among other things, a private attorney, US consul in Hong Kong, an employee of the US Interior and Justice departments, a popular lecturer and writer. He even portrayed himself in a lost silent film. Ramage sometimes slips into the biographer’s trap—admiring his subject so thoroughly that he can utter only a rare discouraging word about Mosby, who owned slaves and once shot an unarmed classmate. Also unconvincing is the cereal-box psychology Ramage applies to Mosby—viz., his boyhood battles with bullies explain his ferocious fighting spirit. A volume that will become the standard reference on Mosby—intelligent and thorough, but at times flattering rather than analytical. (32 b&w illustrations, 7 maps, not seen)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-8131-2135-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Univ. Press of Kentucky
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1999
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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