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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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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