A highly readable, often insightful analysis of an unequaled prose master for whom writing was “the supreme artifact of...
How the 16th president used—and transformed—the English language.
Famously self-taught, Lincoln’s understanding of and familiarity with the language depended to a large degree on his reading, and Kaplan (The Singular Mark Twain, 2003, etc.) offers a thorough survey of all the sources that informed the young autodidact. From early influences like the Bible and Dilworth’s Speller, to particular favorites like Poe’s “The Raven,” to the Enlightenment essayists and poets Pope and Milton, to Romantics Burns and Byron and, above all, Shakespeare, Lincoln heard background rhythms he would later masterfully adapt to his own emerging personal voice. Kaplan looks at halting childhood exercises; early political speeches and circulars; love letters and letters to friends; stabs at poetry (overpraised by Kaplan); eulogies for Zachary Taylor and Henry Clay; addresses to Congress; and even a brief to the Supreme Court in Broadwell v. Lewis. The author effectively demonstrates how Lincoln brought elements of his own personality—melancholy and humor, lawyerly precision and clarity, down-to-earth language and intellectual intensity—to prose that came to be defined as quintessentially American. Although the immortal presidential addresses receive scant attention here—perhaps because they’ve been exhaustively covered in fine books like Harold Holzer’s Lincoln at Cooper Union: The Speech That Made Abraham Lincoln President (2004) and Garry Wills’s Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America (1992)—by the time Kaplan places Lincoln in the White House, readers require no further guide to Lincoln’s methods, nor any further convincing about the man’s linguistic brilliance.
A highly readable, often insightful analysis of an unequaled prose master for whom writing was “the supreme artifact of human genius.”Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-077334-2
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2008
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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