A lively, well-written, and most timely study of diplomacy in action.
Here’s breaking news for the Francophobic freedom-fries set: without France, there would have been no United States.
“The majority of the guns fired on the British at Saratoga were French,” writes ace biographer/historian Schiff (Véra [Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov], 1999; Saint-Exupéry, 1994). “Four years later, when the British set down their muskets at Yorktown, they surrendered to forces that were nearly equal parts French and American, all of them fed and clothed and paid by France, and protected by de Grasse’s fleet.” Moreover, she adds, the French came up with the equivalent of $9 billion to secure American independence. But without Benjamin Franklin, Schiff argues, France likely would not have come to the aid of the fledgling republic. It was not only that Franklin, who a few years before had been an ardent royalist, presented the American cause as an ideal way for France to play knavish tricks on Britain, but also that Franklin was not Silas Deane. The latter, a staid Connecticut businessman, was Congress’s representative in Paris, having arrived there just three days after the Declaration of Independence was promulgated; his duties also involved espionage, but Deane was an unable spy. Moreover, he was a bumpkin compared to the British ambassador, who had a grand time announcing every American defeat to the court at Versailles. Franklin’s reputation as a sophisticate and man of letters and science preceded him, and he found himself welcome and even lionized. His steady lobbying soon brought material aid to the much-suffering rebels, though the French and Americans forged a partnership “founded on various illusions about the past and a general misunderstanding of the future”; the professional French military scorned the American militia as mere rabble, and the French in general felt that the Americans showed too little gratitude to them for their help. Which evens the score, one supposes, for subsequent American complaints that the French have been insufficiently grateful for our help. . . .
A lively, well-written, and most timely study of diplomacy in action.Pub Date: April 2, 2005
ISBN: 0-8050-6633-0
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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