A welcome addition to the literature of the colonial frontier.
A displaced Irish Catholic dreams of home, but instead creates a Celtic homeland in the heart of Iroquois country.
Building on recent studies of the Indian-white frontier (e.g., Shirley Christian’s Before Lewis and Clark, 2004; and Jill Lepore’s The Name of War, 1998) and the mixed society that formed in the margin between nations, Irish Times columnist O’Toole (A Traitor’s Kiss, 1998, etc.) recounts the life of the soldier-adventurer William Johnson. The scion of a landowning family whose holdings had been badly reduced by the English conquest of Ireland, Johnson followed the example of his older cousin, a hero of the Royal Navy, and served the Crown, but always with qualifications, and always with one overarching imperative: to “get back the ancestral lands.” Johnson found himself deep in the forests of northern New York, where, setting the stage for the French and Indian War, he negotiated alliances with the Iroquois nations and organized raids into French Canada. The war he and his rangers fought was much different from the stand-and-shoot model of European conflict. One young French officer, for instance, fought bravely but was killed when he asked for quarters; Johnson recorded that the young man’s wounds were so bad that it was a mercy killing, but, writes O’Toole, “the pretence that killing him was an act of kindness does not alter the evident reality that his scalp was worth £10.” So it was on the frontier, where ordinary laws did not apply and Johnson, in fact, was more or less free to set his own rules. And so he did, sometimes violating the directives of the Crown to his advantage. O’Toole capably recounts Johnson’s achievements in making peace, however tenuous, on the frontier, and making a refuge for displaced Catholic Scots and Irish—a place that would become an extraordinarily bloody battleground soon after Johnson’s death, at the start of the Revolution.
A welcome addition to the literature of the colonial frontier.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-374-28128-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 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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