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LINCOLN'S BISHOP

Name: LINCOLN'S BISHOP
Author: Gustav Niebuhr
ISBN: 978-0-06-209768-2

A PRESIDENT, A PRIEST, AND THE FATE OF 300 DAKOTA SIOUX WARRIORS

by Gustav Niebuhr ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2014

A pleasant surprise for the average history buff.

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Enlightening tale of Abraham Lincoln’s other war.

In 1862, overshadowed by the Civil War, a dire conflict known as the Dakota War roiled the southern half of Minnesota. Journalist Niebuhr (Newspaper and Online Journalism/Syracuse Univ.; Beyond Tolerance: Searching for Interfaith Understanding in America, 2008) provides an intriguing examination of this chapter in American frontier history, focusing especially on the figure of Henry Benjamin Whipple (1822-1901). A transplant from New York and Illinois, Whipple was the first Episcopal bishop in Minnesota and immediately began crusading on behalf of Native Americans there. “He stated his goal simply: the Indians must be protected from corrupt government agents and rapacious traders, especially those who dealt in liquor and abused women,” writes the author. Throughout even the direst moments of the Dakota War and its aftermath, Whipple maintained that maltreatment at the hands of the American government had driven the Dakotas to acts of violence—and in many instances, quite grotesque violence. Niebuhr lays out the precipitant causes of the war—delayed annuities for tribes that had traded in land, leading to hunger and resentment—and chronicles its opening volleys. He also provides a detailed account of the war’s major engagements and its effects on white settlement. But the author always comes back to Whipple, seen by many as an Indian sympathizer, who nonetheless had profound influence on policymakers. His triumph was in convincing Lincoln to spare the lives of 275 Dakota captives (others were hanged for wanton brutality during the war). Niebuhr’s work sometimes feels choppy, bouncing back and forth chronologically and going over some of the same ground more than once. However, that does not lessen the fact that it provides a service by reintroducing readers to Whipple, an early proponent of minority rights, as well as to the Dakota War.

A pleasant surprise for the average history buff.

Pub Date: June 1, 2014

ISBN: 978-0-06-209768-2

Page Count: 256

Publisher: HarperOne

Review Posted Online: June 9, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

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GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)