A well-written biography of our most influential jurist. Smith (George Bush's War, 1992, etc.) attributes the chief justice of the Supreme Court's lifelong commitment to national, as against state, power to his service in Washington's army during the American Revolution, including the bitter winter at Valley Forge. After the Revolution, he slowly built a lucrative law practice in Richmond, Va., while occasionally serving in state office and avidly supporting the Federalist Party; the extent to which political disagreement fostered Marshall's fully reciprocated animosity toward his second cousin, Thomas Jefferson, is unclear. As an emissary to France, Marshall showed sound judgment in the diplomatic crisis known as the XYZ Affair; he subsequently served with distinction in Congress and as secretary of state before President John Adams appointed him chief justice at age 45. Marshall used his enormous political skill and personal appeal to unite the Supreme Court in forging its most important early decisions, including Marbury v. Madison, which established the federal judiciary's authority to determine the constitutionality of acts of Congress and the president; McCulloch v. Maryland, which declared the supremacy of federal over conflicting state law; and the Dartmouth College case, which made possible the development of the corporation as an engine of economic activity. It is hard to imagine the course of American history had these decisions not been as lucidly and forcefully articulated as they were by Marshall, so the sobriquet ``definer of a nation'' is justifiable hyperbole. The book is flawed, however, by a failure to discuss the element of self-interest that often accompanied Marshall's political and jurisprudential values. Moreover, although Marshall emerges as an attractive combination of conviviality and pragmatism, his role in what would now be called a dysfunctional family might have been worth exploring. Borders on hagiography, but learned and readable. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-8050-1389-X
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1996
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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