Engrossing and timely, offering astute, thorough coverage of America’s premier iconoclast and the cultural stage upon which...
Cradle-to-moldering-grave biography of America’s homegrown abolitionist terrorist.
Was it John Brown’s audacity that put the spark to the tinderbox of slavery in mid-19th-century America? The prize-winning Reynolds (Walt Whitman, 2004, etc.; English and American Studies/CUNY) makes the case that the Civil War and emancipation might well have been slower in coming had Brown (1800–59) not inflamed paranoia in the South by his murderous raids in Pottawatomie, Kan., and his seizure of the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Va. The author argues that Brown was more of a Puritan pioneer than crazed fanatic, a patriarchal figure who “won the battle not with bullets but with words.” Although the violence of Brown’s anti-slavery raids was at first roundly denounced in the North, his calm and rational behavior after his capture, Reynolds emphasizes, eventually won admiration for his crusade, much thanks to Emerson, Thoreau and other transcendentalists who took up his banner. Though unabashedly hagiographic—the chapter on his execution is titled “The Passion”—the biography justifies its portrayal of Brown as an agent outside and above the norms of society. The author demonstrates that his nonracist behavior, for example, was startlingly original to Southerners and Northerners alike, albeit not anomalous vis-à-vis contemporary European attitudes. Reynolds takes great pains to cast a fair light on an exceptionally controversial figure who used brutally violent tactics to bring about the end of slavery and the beginning of racial equality. He states unequivocally that Brown’s tactics were terrorist (and an inspiration to John Wilkes Booth), but in President Lincoln’s own words, the Civil War itself was “a John Brown raid on a gigantic scale.” Reynolds’s conclusions are bold yet justified, and his analysis reflects a thorough understanding of the cultural environment of the time.
Engrossing and timely, offering astute, thorough coverage of America’s premier iconoclast and the cultural stage upon which he played his role.Pub Date: April 21, 2005
ISBN: 0-375-41188-7
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2005
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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