An exhaustive biography, which serves as a welcome addition to American Civil War and Quaker history.
Wilson chronicles the life of Jonathan Roberts, a Quaker who served in the Union Army during the Civil War despite his pacifist convictions.
In the late 1840s, Roberts, an educated Quaker from New Jersey, moved to Virginia with other members of the Religious Society of Friends. They hoped to use their land to demonstrate that Virginia farms could be profitable without the use of slave labor. Roberts’ activism was not confined to modeling behavior, and he became known as an outspoken abolitionist voice in the area. As tensions mounted leading up to the Civil War, Roberts became a target for secessionist anger. When the war broke out, Roberts and his family declined to flee to the North, instead remaining in Union-occupied Alexandria. President Lincoln acknowledged the difficult situation of Quakers, writing: “Your people—Friends—have had, and are having, a very great trial. On principle, and faith, opposed to both war and oppression, they can only practically oppose oppression by war. In this hard dilemma, some have chosen one horn and some the other.” Roberts chose the side of war, joining the Union Army as a non-arms-bearing scout and serving as a sheriff. In the capacity of scout, Roberts witnessed combat in encounters such as the First Battle of Bull Run. Wilson—who is Roberts’ great-great-grandson—leaves no stone unturned in his search for the facts of Roberts’ life. The plethora of details on land deals, lawsuits and genealogy can become tiresome, particularly in the prewar and postwar sections of the book. However, Wilson does a fantastic job of capturing the escalating tensions in Virginia, as disagreements over slavery and secession go from election campaign smears to violent harassment to skirmishes over flags to outright warfare. He also uncovers fascinating accounts of relations between neighbors on opposing sides of the conflict—and those whose loyalties and convictions shifted. Wilson’s attention to detail allows readers to gain a more nuanced understanding of the gray areas, contradictions and compromises encountered during the Civil War.
An exhaustive biography, which serves as a welcome addition to American Civil War and Quaker history.Pub Date: Dec. 12, 2014
ISBN: 978-1499289480
Page Count: 732
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 24, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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