A rousing account of bloody sacrifice.
Journalist and historian Kelly chronicles the poorly trained but determined men who fought with George Washington and other commanders to free the North American continent from British rule in the late 18th century.
In an oft-told but still inspiring saga, the author opens his popular history in 1754, as a young Washington was becoming seasoned in battles against French troops seeking to encroach on British territory. After that introduction, Kelly moves the action to 1774, as Washington commands a bunch of ragtag soon-to-be Americans against the British monarchy, which had lost favor due to high taxes, among many other transgressions. Kelly is fascinated by the details of specific battles, but he is well-aware that without finely wrought character sketches of those carrying out the fighting, military history can fall flat on the page. As a result, the author has carefully chosen his heroes and villains, using both primary and secondary sources to explain their paths to battle. A combination of psychobiography, lively prose and generous foreshadowing keeps the narrative moving from battle to battle, year after year, until the story ends in 1783. In the final chapter, Kelly looks back from the year 1824 at the remarkable victories of the revolutionaries; it was the 50th anniversary of the self-styled patriots’ encounter with the well-equipped British musketeers at Lexington Green. “Then began a celebration,” writes the author, “such as the nation had never seen: dinners, galas, speeches, salutes, parades, fireworks. At the Lafayette Ball…five thousand guests wandered through a fairyland dominated by thirty-foot-high transparencies showing Lafayette, Washington, and the marquis’ French estate at La Grange.” The hardships the patriots endured—lack of first-rate equipment, food, clothing and protection from severe weather, among other problems—were seared in the memories of the celebratory survivors and those who followed in the experiment of American democracy.
A rousing account of bloody sacrifice.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-137-27877-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
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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