Outstanding.
From a body of work stretching back seven decades, a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian selects 17 essays on characters large and small who illuminate early American history.
Morgan (The Genuine Article: A Historian Looks at Early America, 2004, etc.) offers something new about well-known public heroes, identifying, for example, those issues over which the famously pragmatic Benjamin Franklin refused to compromise. The author shows how John Winthrop’s exhortations to the Bay colonists brought “disagreements to a happy issue,” preventing a Jamestown-style collapse, and why Anne Hutchinson’s dissent, while attractive to our modern sensibilities, posed such a serious threat to the Puritans. He also pens a superb 40-page sketch of William Penn’s character and career. Morgan excels, though, at limning lesser-known figures. He traces the tortuous marital history of Puritan heiress Anna Keayne, examines the Puritan caricature Michael Wigglesworth, assesses the historical reputations of Yale presidents Ezra Stiles and Timothy Dwight and toasts the courage of Giles Corey and Mary Easty, who nearly died for their refusal to submit to Salem’s witchcraft madness. The author also demonstrates that groups can be heroes: the Arawak Indians of Hispaniola, whose demise constitutes the sad first chapter of the European transformation of the Western Hemisphere; the Antifederalists, whose important opposition to the Constitution’s ratification led to the Bill of Rights. This uniformly strong collection boasts an insightful, even startling, observation—“Government requires make-believe”—on nearly every page. If the concluding appreciation of Harvard’s famed historian Perry Miller seems out of place, Morgan may be forgiven for honoring a man who, like Morgan himself, has left us with the “record of a mind” that has thought deeply and creatively about our history.
Outstanding.Pub Date: May 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-393-07010-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2009
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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