A vivid account of the life and times of a Confederate guerrilla. The second life of Quantrill to appear this season (the other being Edward E. Leslie's The Devil Knows How to Ride, p. TKTK), Schultz's is distinguished by the author's determination to show that Quantrill, the bloody ruffian who savaged the Kansas frontier, took part in the Civil War to suit his own agenda. ``He was a cold-blooded killer,'' writes Schultz (Over the Earth I Come, 1992, etc.), ``gunning down Union soldiers and civilians, showing no mercy or remorse . . . waging his personal war under the protection of the Confederate flag. It was a war against the world, driven by hatred and a desire to avenge himself against everyone he imagined had maligned him.'' Schultz, however, does not plunge deeply into psychobiography, apart from noting that as a youth Quantrill seemed to show a marked, ingenious cruelty toward animals. Instead, the author unfolds a shoot-'em-up narrative long on action and short on speculative analysis, one of the virtues of which is to show that some of the men Quantrill hated most (including Missouri's senator Jim Lane, who championed the Union only because it offered more lucrative possibilities and seemed likeliest to win) were no prizes themselves. Schultz is especially good on examining the internal divisions within Quantrill's mixed group of soldiers and on the power struggles to which these divisions led, especially toward the end of the war, when the guerrillas began one by one to abandon their leader, some because ``they were appalled and ashamed at what they had done at Lawrence, gunning down unarmed men and boys, terrorizing women and children, looting and destroying homes,'' others simply because they knew that defeat lay near. Schultz extends his catalog of richly detailed, well-written histories with this life of Quantrill, who emerges less as a psychopath than as a soldier bent on bringing total destruction to his enemy. (8 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 11, 1996
ISBN: 0-312-14710-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1996
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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