Lincoln completists will want it, but the content and concepts are covered better elsewhere.
More stories may have been told about Abraham Lincoln than any other U.S. president; here’s a representative, somewhat haphazardly chosen batch, showing the popular image of Lincoln as it developed over the years.
Wheeler (Christmas In My Heart series) brings together a variety of pieces, mostly from largely forgotten magazines of the late-19th and early-20th centuries. The implicit goal of those stories was to present Lincoln as a model for young people, much as the George Washington “cherry tree” story did. Typical are several stories of the president learning of a farm boy in the Union Army sentenced to death for sleeping on duty, often substituting for a wounded comrade. Lincoln, full of compassion for the common people, pardoned the offender, who went on to perform heroically later in the war. It’s a touching tale, undoubtedly a true reflection of Lincoln’s character, and odds are it actually happened a few times. The story also tells us something of how the generations immediately after the war thought of Lincoln—as a wise father figure who never lost the common touch or the ability to laugh at himself. But one good tale of a sleeping sentinel should have sufficed. Other stories make similar points—e.g., Lincoln giving a girl a gold piece for her church’s missionary fund, a young Lincoln driving a coach across rough country while rich lawyers rode in comfort. A few, such as William Agnew Paton’s story of himself as a schoolboy interviewing the president, appear to be factual. Others focus on Lincoln’s family, especially his young son. But Wheeler doesn’t appear to have tried to separate true accounts from fiction, and the stories aren’t, on the whole, particularly well-written. The best entries here are probably the ones written closest to Lincoln’s own time, such as Whitman’s “O Captain! My Captain!”
Lincoln completists will want it, but the content and concepts are covered better elsewhere.Pub Date: June 11, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4767-0286-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Howard Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2013
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
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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