A fine addition to shelves of historians and Lincoln aficionados, though it may lack wider appeal.
Historian Emerson (Lincoln the Inventor, 2009, etc.) produces a new biography of President Lincoln’s eldest son, Robert Todd Lincoln (1843–1926).
Abraham Lincoln is a seemingly inexhaustible subject for authors and scholars, with some 15,000 books written about him since 1865. This fascination may help explain this new biography of his son, who became a successful attorney, presidential cabinet member, minister to Great Britain and businessman. Emerson has written or edited three previous books on the Lincolns, and he does a thorough job on a relatively minor figure; Lincolniana completists will certainly welcome it. The more mundane facts here—such as the younger Lincoln’s grades at Harvard as the nation headed toward the Civil War—may not engage casual readers, nor will an overlong section detailing Lincoln’s opinions on various biographies of his father. But other subjects are more compelling, such as his complicated relationship with his troubled mother and his committing her to a sanitarium. Also intriguing are the odd coincidences that peppered Lincoln’s life. For example: He was once rescued from being crushed by a train by bystander Edwin Booth, brother of the man who would soon murder his father at Ford’s Theatre; in 1881, while serving as Secretary of War, he was present when President James Garfield was gunned down in Washington, D.C.; in 1901, he arrived at the Pan-American Exposition shortly after President William McKinley was shot there. It bears noting, however, that Robert Lincoln was a rather low-key Victorian gentleman who once said, “My father was a great man, but I am not.” Some readers may wonder whether he would have deemed himself worthy of a comprehensive biography, if he were not the son of arguably the greatest president in American history.
A fine addition to shelves of historians and Lincoln aficionados, though it may lack wider appeal.Pub Date: May 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-8093-3055-3
Page Count: 638
Publisher: Southern Illinois Univ.
Review Posted Online: March 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2012
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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