It seemed like a great match: one historian fascinated by the paradoxes of power writing about a great predecessor. But...
Wills (The Rosary, 2005, etc.) may have attempted something beyond even his considerable powers in this overly ambitious examination of the great American historian Henry Adams (1838–1918).
When remembered at all, Adams’s multi-volume, epic history of the administrations of Jefferson and Madison, collectively referred to here as the History, has been criticized (notably by historian Richard Hofstadter) for its negativity. Wills argues that this is a willful misreading derived from considering only the works’ first chapters, which focus on the largely unformed America of 1800. Moreover, Adams’s The Education of Henry Adams looms so large in the Adams canon that all his other works are subsumed in its penumbra of pessimism. Though righting the balance by underscoring Adams’s essential nationalism and optimism, Wills unnecessarily bogs down his analysis with a long recapitulation of his subject’s narrative. In the first third of his book, Wills discusses the elements that prepared Adams to write his masterpiece, including a fascination with the South and extensive travel. Rebutting the charge that Adams was continuing longstanding family feuds with the Democratic-Republicans, Wills convincingly points out that this great-grandson and grandson of Presidents John and John Quincy sometimes displayed hostility to his fabled forebears. And he makes a great case that Adams’s epic is a “nonfiction prose masterpiece of the nineteenth century in America,” one that pioneered the use of foreign and domestic archival sources, blended intellectual, military, diplomatic and economic history, and distilled it all in a richly ironic voice. Ultimately, however, in the last two-thirds of this book, Wills merely covers the same ground as Adams, and pulls from his own “Negro President”and James Madison.
It seemed like a great match: one historian fascinated by the paradoxes of power writing about a great predecessor. But Wills loses his focus—and, oddly enough, even his own familiar provocative voice.Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2005
ISBN: 0-618-13430-1
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
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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