Well-researched and engaging.
The life of the eminent naval hero that focuses on the mysterious circumstances surrounding his death as well as his military accomplishments.
As depicted by naval historian de Kay (The Rebel Raiders, 2002, etc.), Stephen Decatur (1779–1820) seemed destined for greatness at an early age. His father spent the Revolutionary War hunting down English merchant vessels, and Stephen earned his own glory in a navy very different from the service today. In the early-19th century, much of an officer’s income came from his share of property seized from the enemy, who in those days tended to speak French. Decatur distinguished himself by battling Arabs who spoke Italian, and he gave the young republican navy a resounding motto when an Algerian admiral asked him “Dove andate?” (“Where are you going?”), to which he replied, “Dove mi piace!” (“Where I please!”). Decatur’s initial course took him in the path of an older officer named James Barron, who at first was an important ally and friend; “in later years,” de Kay writes, “Decatur would freely admit that he had once revered Barron as his own father.” But the younger man’s reverential attitude disappeared when, in 1807, Barron struck his colors before an attacking English vessel without firing a shot. The attack, one of many incidents that helped precipitate war with England five years later, cost Commodore Barron his command, and Decatur served on the court that sentenced his onetime friend to a five-year suspension from the service. Protesting his innocence, Barron waited out his suspension as a merchant skipper in Denmark, then returned and requested reinstatement. Decatur, now a member of the Board of Naval Commissioners, outspokenly opposed this, and in response Barron challenged him to a duel—an act engineered by a third party, de Kay suggests—that cost Decatur his life.
Well-researched and engaging.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-4245-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2003
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
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