A clear, concise look at one aspect of Lincoln, the man and the president.
Lincoln scholar Guelzo (Civil War Era/Gettysburg Coll.; Gettysburg: The Last Invasion, 2013, etc.) explores race in America as an element of African-American history as affected by Abraham Lincoln and the Emancipation Declaration.
Lincoln condemned slavery politically and economically but never with a mention of the racial aspect. He thought of slaves as being equal but not equal enough for the vote; in fact, he did not favor any equality of civil privilege. He never spoke of slaves as black. He believed in the separation of the races and did not want slavery to be allowed in the new territories because he wanted “them for the homes of free white people.” The author points to Lincoln’s deeper aims. He felt that slaveholders, in their greed for profit, threatened the white man’s charter of freedom, the Declaration of Independence. He saw slavery as an outrage against the law of nature. Self-determination for states was equally wrong, as a mere majority rule cannot reverse natural law. If so, when the majority turns its restrictive power against you, you will be unprotected. Guelzo provides a wonderful section on reparations, pointing out the difficulties of who should sue whom and for what. The author points out that, as only state laws allowed slavery, there is no statutory culpability in federal court. Finally, he delves into Lincoln’s religion. He was not a member of an established church but read and quoted the Bible with ease. He once said, “if General Lee was driven back from Pennsylvania, I would crown the result by the declaration of freedom to the slaves.” The author includes the political achievements of Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington’s economic work, and W.E.B. Du Bois’ cultural determination to further illuminate our perceptions of race and responsibility.
A clear, concise look at one aspect of Lincoln, the man and the president.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-674-28611-5
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2015
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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