In a 1932 essay, James Thurber imagined a librarian of Congress, overwhelmed by pointless biographies of Civil Warera figures, imposing fines for new books about Lincoln. Wilson (director, International Center for Jefferson Studies), however, makes a highly original contribution to Lincoln studies with this thoughtful portrait of the war president's remarkable development during the 1830s and '40s from a frontier bumpkin into a rarely gifted leader. It is startling to encounter Wilson's portrait of the young Abe Lincoln as a small-time brawler and petty frontier politician who had troubled relations with women (ultimately resulting in a marriage of convenience to Mary Todd), suffered severe bouts of depression, and made vicious anonymous attacks on political opponents in newspapers. It is a truism that Lincoln's origins were humble. They were also, as Wilson reminds us, violent. On the frontier, one established one's manliness, and even one's political credibility, by fighting, wrestling, and even dueling, and Lincoln was a superior fighter. Indeed, a turning point of his life was his 1831 wrestling match with Jack Armstrong of the Clary's Grove Boys, which established Lincoln as a leader of the New Salem settlement. (In closely analyzing the many varied accounts of the match, Wilson conducts a fascinating exercise in historiography and the distortion of historical memory by the growth of legend and the passage of time.) And though ``honest Abe'' was honest indeed by frontier standards, he could be slippery and dissembling in the battles of prairie politics. He proved to be a sharp, unsparing tactician in court and in the Illinois legislature. Nonetheless, Wilson shows, Lincoln constantly battled his shortcomings and, endowed with innate sensitivity to people and a real regard for honorable conduct, transcended his rough origins to achieve national prominence and, ultimately, greatness. An absorbing and first-rate contribution to Lincoln studies. (2 maps and 3 photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-679-40788-X
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1998
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
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