In this lucid, exemplary biography, Unger focuses on not just Clay, but also on the formation of the early republic, a time...
A comprehensive biography of the statesman whom Abraham Lincoln called “the ideal politician.”
By our lights, Henry Clay (1777-1852) was a bundle of contradictions. He was adamant about his right to own slaves, for instance, but he was just as adamant that slavery was wrong. He was also a strong advocate of the precedence of the Union over states’ rights, even as he argued against the expansion of the Union through conquest during the Mexican-American War. It was his bravery in holding unpopular opinions that caused Lincoln, as prolific historian Unger ("Mr. President": George Washington and the Making of the Nation's Highest Office, 2013, etc.) writes, to consider Clay his intellectual and political forefather. Clay, the author writes, was “the first true American leader,” born on the Virginia frontier the year after independence was declared and thus never a British citizen. His sharp mind and rhetorical skills set him apart from his fellow law clerks, “with a command of courthouse legal jargon, a winning baritone voice, and a range of adolescent skills that included cards, gambling, drinking, a quick sharp tongue, and ears and eyes that absorbed every opportunity for advantage and advancement.” Setting up shop as a lawyer in Kentucky, he soon distinguished himself as a populist who called for the expansion of voters rights and naturally allied with representatives and not senators—though, in time, he would serve in both houses of Congress and run numerous times for the presidency. Clay, best known for his saying “I would rather be right than be president,” became famous in the 1830s for his implacable opposition to Andrew Jackson, another southerner, but he was much more: a diplomat and peacemaker who attempted to forge compromises that, then as now, the heated politics of the day made difficult, if not impossible.
In this lucid, exemplary biography, Unger focuses on not just Clay, but also on the formation of the early republic, a time too little studied today. An excellent introduction to a turbulent era.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-306-82391-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A potent depiction of grief, but also a book lacking the originality and acerbic prose that distinguished Didion’s earlier...
A moving record of Didion’s effort to survive the death of her husband and the near-fatal illness of her only daughter.
In late December 2003, Didion (Where I Was From, 2003, etc.) saw her daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, hospitalized with a severe case of pneumonia, the lingering effects of which would threaten the young woman’s life for several months to come. As her daughter struggled in a New York ICU, Didion’s husband, John Gregory Dunne, suffered a massive heart attack and died on the night of December 30, 2003. For 40 years, Didion and Dunne shared their lives and work in a marriage of remarkable intimacy and endurance. In the wake of Dunne’s death, Didion found herself unable to accept her loss. By “magical thinking,” Didion refers to the ruses of self-deception through which the bereaved seek to shield themselves from grief—being unwilling, for example, to donate a dead husband’s clothes because of the tacit awareness that it would mean acknowledging his final departure. As a poignant and ultimately doomed effort to deny reality through fiction, that magical thinking has much in common with the delusions Didion has chronicled in her several previous collections of essays. But perhaps because it is a work of such intense personal emotion, this memoir lacks the mordant bite of her earlier work. In the classics Slouching Toward Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979), Didion linked her personal anxieties to her withering dissection of a misguided culture prey to its own self-gratifying fantasies. This latest work concentrates almost entirely on the author’s personal suffering and confusion—even her husband and daughter make but fleeting appearances—without connecting them to the larger public delusions that have been her special terrain.
A potent depiction of grief, but also a book lacking the originality and acerbic prose that distinguished Didion’s earlier writing.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4314-X
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
IN THE NEWS
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
A unique, incandescent memoir.
A lyrical, soul-stirring memoir about how an acclaimed Native American poet and musician came to embrace “the spirit of poetry.”
For Harjo, life did not begin at birth. She came into the world as an already-living spirit with the goal to release “the voices, songs, and stories” she carried with her from the “ancestor realm.” On Earth, she was the daughter of a half-Cherokee mother and a Creek father who made their home in Tulsa, Okla. Her father's alcoholism and volcanic temper eventually drove Harjo's mother and her children out of the family home. At first, the man who became the author’s stepfather “sang songs and smiled with his eyes,” but he soon revealed himself to be abusive and controlling. Harjo's primary way of escaping “the darkness that plagued the house and our family” was through drawing and music, two interests that allowed her to leave Oklahoma and pursue her high school education at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. Interaction with her classmates enlightened her to the fact that modern Native American culture and history had been shaped by “colonization and dehumanization.” An education and raised consciousness, however, did not spare Harjo from the hardships of teen pregnancy, poverty and a failed first marriage, but hard work and luck gained her admittance to the University of New Mexico, where she met a man whose “poetry opened one of the doors in my heart that had been closed since childhood.” But his hard-drinking ways wrecked their marriage and nearly destroyed Harjo. Faced with the choice of submitting to despair or becoming “crazy brave,” she found the courage to reclaim a lost spirituality as well as the “intricate and metaphorical language of my ancestors.”
A unique, incandescent memoir.Pub Date: July 9, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-393-07346-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2012
SEEN & HEARD
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