In his first inaugural address, Ronald Reagan referred to Joseph Warren as “a man who might have been one of the greatest...
A fresh biography of an underappreciated figure in American history.
John Trumbull immortalized Dr. Joseph Warren (1741-1775) in his painting The Death of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker’s Hill, which depicted the demise of the young physician and military officer. In his first book, Di Spigna, a speaker and volunteer at Colonial Williamsburg, reminds readers that Warren was more than a man who sacrificed his life for the cause of liberty. The son of a pious Massachusetts farmer, Warren attended Harvard, where the future revolutionary developed his oratorical skills when he was not committing pranks such as nailing his roommates’ shoes to the floor. His training as a physician coincided with the post–French and Indian War crisis between Britain and her American Colonies, and Warren would hold several positions in the Massachusetts resistance: head of the Boston Committee of Correspondence and North End Caucus, president of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, and chairman of the Massachusetts Committee of Safety. He delivered two prominent orations on the Boston Massacre, wrote numerous articles and pamphlets, authored the Suffolk Resolves, sent Paul Revere on his famous ride, operated a spy ring, and participated in the battles of Lexington and Concord. In short, Di Spigna persuasively argues that Warren was “a rare combination of statesman and warrior” and that “his effective arsenal of voice, pen, and sword was unrivaled by any other patriot.” Yet the author does not neglect Warren’s medical career. He was one of the most prominent and respected physicians in Massachusetts, inoculating hundreds of people against smallpox without a single death. Warren was also a prominent Mason and devoted family man.
In his first inaugural address, Ronald Reagan referred to Joseph Warren as “a man who might have been one of the greatest among the founding fathers.” Hopefully, Di Spigna’s insightful biography will rekindle public interest in Warren, a man who deserves to be remembered for more than his death at Bunker Hill.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-553-41932-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 8, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
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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