Next book

THE MAN IN THE MIRROR

A LIFE OF BENEDICT ARNOLD

A biography that explains coherently—despite its rather thick layer of pop psych—why Benedict Arnold became the American Revolution's Lucifer, the brightest angel who suffered the steepest fall from grace. Colonial historian Brandt (An American Aristocracy, 1986) locates the seed of Arnold's treason in ``the great American virus: social insecurity.'' In his teens, Arnold was forced to leave an elite private academy because of his alcoholic father's bankruptcy. Brandt's prose can rise to an almost hysterically portentous pitch (Arnold ``teetered on the brink of an inner abyss that had been gouged in his soul by the earthquake that had struck''), but despite a lack of subtlety in characterization, her thesis enables her to identify ambition as the connecting thread between Arnold as energetic, intelligent, and courageous soldier and Arnold as greedy traitor. Notoriously touchy about the most dimly perceived slights, Arnold could take no solace in his reputation as the best American battlefield general of the war. Lacking a moral compass, he saw money and social prestige as his surest validations of character- -and, when these were lacking, he alienated potential allies with petulant outbursts. His downfall began when, as military commandant of Philadelphia, he mixed with well-heeled Loyalists (including his future wife, the beautiful Peggy Shippen) and engaged in war profiteering. Brandt takes us through the familiar events that followed: Arnold's court-martial for financial malfeasance, his bungled attempt to hand over West Point to the British, and his final years as a financially insecure social leper in Canada and England. Despite Arnold's ``mighty heart,'' he was brought down by self-delusion and a reckless unconcern for any but himself (he sealed Major John Andre's doom by needlessly sending him behind Continental lines disguised as a civilian). Piercing insights into one of our most infamous figures, though no match for Willard Sterne Randall's superb Benedict Arnold (1990). (Maps and b&w illustrations—not seen)

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1994

ISBN: 0-679-40106-7

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1993

Next book

NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 19


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


Google Rating

  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating
Next book

INTO THE WILD

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 19


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


Google Rating

  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating

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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)

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

Close Quickview