Readers will surely remember Jack Slade henceforth. A treat for Western history buffs and fans of true crime.
An ambitious, well-written effort to restore a Wild West desperado to history.
Broad Street Review editor Rottenberg (In the Kingdom of Coal, 2003, etc.) has a yen for back roads geographical and historical. This long tale, full of shaggy-dog elements, begins on a back road on the High Plains that was once America’s chief highway for wagon trains crossing to California and the Pacific Northwest by way of South Pass, Wyo. There he picks up the trail of Joseph Alfred “Jack” Slade, a figure long forgotten, turning up these days in the occasional monograph or journal article. Slade, by Rottenberg’s vigorous account, has all the makings of a Western character that ought to be remembered, begging for portrayal by, say, Tommy Lee Jones or Russell Crowe. Zelig-like, he turns up as a muleteer, wagon-train driver and stagecoach exec along the Emigrant Trail, serving as de facto law of the land over a large area of what is now Nebraska, Colorado and Wyoming. His stern enforcement of the law in a time of outlaws and dry-gulchers, to say nothing of secessionists, kept a steady flow of ore streaming from the western goldfields to the federal treasury. Yet this lawman went bad, turning to drink and crime, becoming a bully and general pest across his former domain. Ironically, given that he was one of those who “could believe that a few salutary hangings might enhance their security,” he met his end at the hands of a vigilante mob, as Mark Twain recorded in Roughing It—inaccurately, Rottenberg shows. Likening Slade to the twin leads of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Rottenberg considers why Slade’s trail went south, and why he is not better remembered—perhaps because “he resisted neat categorization…He could not even be labeled a good man or a bad one.”
Readers will surely remember Jack Slade henceforth. A treat for Western history buffs and fans of true crime.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59416-070-7
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Westholme Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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