A well-written, useful précis of Monroe’s life and career.
A nearly forgotten president comes in for soft-spoken tribute, courtesy of one-time U.S. Senator Hart (The Fourth Power, 2004, etc.).
Hart allows that it is difficult to make a case for considering James Monroe “a great president by the standards usually reserved for great presidents.” That notwithstanding, Hart says, Monroe was a skilled diplomat whose quiet, dogged work yielded the Louisiana Purchase and averted war with France, Spain and England; as president, he helped guide the nation out of an economic depression, and, of course, he formulated the principles that would come to be known as the Monroe Doctrine. It is this last achievement for which Monroe is best remembered, though few casual students of American history are conversant with the details. Hart ably elucidates those principles, among which are the serving of notice that the U.S. would not allow the extension of any monarchical European government into the Americas and that it would actively bar the reassertion of European power over any former colony that had declared itself free, as so much of South America had done with respect to Spain. Moreover, Hart observes, whereas the conventional view of the Monroe Doctrine is that it is a unilateralist declaration that “Europe is no longer welcome in the Western Hemisphere,” the actual formulation is reciprocal, assuring that the U.S. would not interfere in European affairs but would also not tolerate European interference in American affairs broadly viewed. Hart notes that Monroe was “a military man before he was a diplomat or politician,” with a well-honed view of geopolitics and an understanding, early on, that America’s destiny lay in westward expansion and emergence as a world power. Finally, on the personal front, Hart approvingly records that though Monroe was not above ambition or self-aggrandizement, he was also capable of distinguishing politics from friendship and was known for his warmth and kindness.
A well-written, useful précis of Monroe’s life and career.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2005
ISBN: 0-8050-6960-7
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
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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