A distinguished addition to the recent run of outstanding antebellum histories and biographies.
A comprehensive biography of Lincoln’s political idol, the man said to have declared, “I had rather be right than be President.”
The breathtaking scope of Henry Clay’s career on the national stage surely accounts for the unique distinction accorded him at death (1777–1852). The first American to lie in state in the Capitol’s Rotunda, the Kentuckian transformed the House Speakership into a powerful office. As a diplomat, he helped negotiate the Treaty of Ghent, ending the War of 1812, later served as John Quincy Adams’s Secretary of State, and was part of the Great Triumvirate that included Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun. A constantly defeated presidential candidate, Clay’s adherence to staid tradition and a middle course proved no match for irresistible national impulses arising in the Age of Jackson. David and Jeanne Heidler (History/Colorado State Univ.-Pueblo and History/United States Air Force Academy; Daily Lives of Civilians in Wartime Early America, 2007, etc.) cover these political high watermarks in illuminating detail, but the beauty and strength of this biography is the full-blooded portrait of the man that accounts for the devotion Clay inspired and the hatreds he aroused. “Prince Hal” to his admirers and “the Judas of the West” (for his alleged part in the “Corrupt Bargain” that gave Adams the presidency) to his detractors, Clay was a powerful orator and convivial raconteur. Notwithstanding frequent, debilitating illnesses, he traveled widely, maneuvered constantly, survived two duels, fathered 11 children and bred racehorses and innovative crops on his slave-operated estate. The authors carefully examine Clay’s tortured slavery straddle—he often publicly declared the institution’s immorality—placing his views in context, but forthrightly acknowledging the Great Compromiser’s poignant inability to resolve the internal inconsistencies of his own position, attributing the failure to “a fundamental flaw in an otherwise good and decent man.”
A distinguished addition to the recent run of outstanding antebellum histories and biographies.Pub Date: May 18, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6726-8
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2010
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
