Justly returns our attention to Adams—though liberal readers will prefer Mark Puls’s 2006 biography, which emphasizes his...
Neocon view of the least-known Founding Father, arguing that his religious beliefs fueled his revolutionary ardor and, in today’s more secular America, have denied him his due from historians.
By the time this tendentious biography ends, it’s evident—to the author, at least—that Samuel Adams (1722–1803) would gleefully have supported firearms in every living room, prayer in the public schools and the invasion of Iraq. New York Sun managing editor Stoll does not display his conservative cards plainly until the end, but it’s patent that this is no disinterested analysis. However, it does provide the basic information. Adams’s father sold beer malt and was also christened Samuel (hence the name of today’s popular brand of brew). Before hostilities erupted, Adams the younger was a fiery journalist writing under a variety of pen names who made invaluable contributions to the revolution. Indeed, he was there on its opening day: Hiding from the British in Lexington, Adams and John Hancock quite literally heard, but did not see, the shot heard ’round the world. Before and after independence, Adams devoted much of his life to public service, as a representative to both Continental Congresses, a state legislator, lieutenant governor and governor of Massachusetts, whose constitution he helped frame. He never held national office. Stoll quotes frequently from Adams’s journalism and correspondence, making certain that readers are aware of nearly everything he ever wrote that alluded to the Bible—he liked to compare America’s revolutionaries with the biblical Israelites—or revealed his belief that religion should be at the heart of American life. Adams’s last known letter was to Thomas Paine, chiding him for his work on the skeptical The Age of Reason.
Justly returns our attention to Adams—though liberal readers will prefer Mark Puls’s 2006 biography, which emphasizes his role as a rabble-rousing man of the common people.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-7432-9911-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
