Vividly recounts the price of inflexibility and political failure in times of crisis.
A portrait of Abraham Lincoln’s vice president and successor over six crucial weeks that preserved a nation but brought an administration to ruin.
Means, a senior editor at Washingtonian magazine, zeroes in on the aftermath of Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865 to track Andrew Johnson as he completed a seemingly fated transition from promising patriot to bull in his own china shop. So ultimately eclipsed was his promise, in fact, that most readers may have little awareness of the once-acclaimed virtues that propelled the former congressman, senator and governor into his leadership role. The author questions whether any person other than Lincoln himself could have sealed the victory and healed the wounds of our Civil War, then amply shows how Johnson, determined as he was to faithfully implement Lincoln’s legacy as he saw it, was far less than the man for the job. Not that the deck wasn’t stacked against him: A Tennessee Democrat, he was never accepted by key Republicans in the administration—some, including Lincoln’s widow, Mary, actually suspected the 17th president to be a conspirator in the assassination plot—and he was vehemently hated by the Southern plantocracy. To make matters worse, Johnson had delivered an embarrassingly rambling vice-presidential inaugural address stone drunk—an ironic misstep for someone with a reputation as a mesmerizing “stump” speaker built over countless campaigns. His persistent stubbornness and inability to find common ground with Congress on an effective Reconstruction policy left the South in an economic shambles with four million refugees (a hundred times the number created by Katrina, Means points out). And with full enfranchisement of freed slaves ultimately left to the states that had originally enslaved them, a civil-rights gap emerged and dragged tragically on for a century.
Vividly recounts the price of inflexibility and political failure in times of crisis.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-15-101212-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2006
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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