The subtitle notwithstanding, there’s hardly an untold story to be found here, but a worthy distillation all the same.
A military historian considers Lincoln as military leader—a far from nominal position.
A veteran of battle, Lincoln had disparaged James Polk’s touching off the Mexican War: “So far as Lincoln was concerned,” Perret (Jack: A Life Like No Other, 2001, etc.) writes, “Polk had gone to war with Mexico to revive the political fortunes of the Democratic Party, and not for any higher aim.” Similar charges would be leveled at Lincoln, with Republican Party founder William H. Seward urging him to “change the question before the Public from one of Slavery, or about Slavery to a question upon Union or Disunion.” But Lincoln took his abolitionist fight seriously—and, as many modern historians have observed, as the primary purpose for waging war on the South. Lincoln—who claimed that his greatest success in life was commanding a militia detachment in the Black Hawk War—was closely involved in the daily conduct of the war, Perret shows. Lincoln saw to it that generals were appointed by federal authority, not that of the states. He planned operations and logistics, and he wasn’t being hyperbolic when he famously remarked of a recalcitrant combat leader, “If General McClellan does not want to use the Army, I would like to borrow it.” He promoted leaders, and he broke them, as when he removed the military commander of occupied New Orleans for looting. He imposed strategy on his greatest commanders, including Ulysses S. Grant. And he even showed up for combat on a couple of occasions, though one Union officer sensibly warned him, “There is nothing in the Constitution authorizing the Commander in Chief to expose himself to the enemy’s fire where he can do no good!” Perret does an admirable job of weaving these episodes into a readable narrative.
The subtitle notwithstanding, there’s hardly an untold story to be found here, but a worthy distillation all the same.Pub Date: April 27, 2004
ISBN: 0-375-50738-8
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2004
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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