From novelist-turned-historian Carr (Casing the Promised Land, 1979), a thorough but plodding biography of American soldier-of- fortune Frederick Townsend Ward. During the 1860's, Ward's brief but meteoric career in the service of the Chinese emperor gave him exceptional influence and status in a society largely closed to foreigners. Ward first appears as a capable mate on American clipper ships engaging in the brisk China trade, with little other than his boldness to suggest the generalissimo of the Ch'ing dynasty he was to become in its protracted struggle against the Taiping Rebellion (1851-64). Taking advantage of Chinese fears in the treaty port of Shanghai, Ward raised a company of foreign irregulars, trained them speedily, and threw them into battle—with less-than-inspiring results. Suffering a bloody rout in an assault on a rebel-held city close to Shanghai, he quickly changed tactics, recruiting Chinese for his main force and closely drilling them in Western methods so that within months he enjoyed a string of successes, becoming known internationally as the brilliant commander of the Ever Victorious Army. His exploits became the stuff of legend, and by the time he fell mortally wounded in battle in September 1862, his place in Chinese military history was assured. Carr, meticulous and scholarly throughout, debunks myths as much as possible given the scant information that survives about Ward, but fails to rise above his sources to provide a compelling account. Solid under the circumstances, but disappointing given Ward's persona and his incredible feats: less the measure of the man than a colorless reassembling of his deeds. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Aug. 27, 1991
ISBN: 0-87113-462-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1991
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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