An appealing popular history that is happy to follow various byways to flesh out its portrait of the seventh president’s...
A level, intelligent, and thoroughly readable biography of Old Hickory, from historian Buchanan (The Road to Guilford Courthouse, not reviewed).
Though no revisionist, Buchanan does try to put Jackson’s Indian fighting days into perspective in this ranging history of his life through the War of 1812. He suggests that Jackson’s hardscrabble youth (he was reared in the crude, violent backcountry of South Carolina) burned far more hatred in him of the British—who had killed his mother, brothers, and nearly himself—than of the Indians. The author charts his course from young Jackson reading law in North Carolina, through his days as public prosecutor and then understudy to Governor William Blount, through to his command of troops during the Creek Campaign of the War of 1812. The lands that would become Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Florida—originally known as the Old Southwest—hung in the balance: Spain, Britain, and France had toeholds and designs here, and it was their presence (rather than bloodlust) that spurred Jackson on. He himself hardly denied that the fighting was godawful: “The carnage was dreadful,” he said of the battle at Horseshoe Bend. And Buchanan doesn’t play down Jackson’s frequent scorched-earth policy, but rather places it within the parameters of national acquisition. The real strength of this study, however, lies in its thoroughgoing history of colonial-native relations, good and bad, and the quick sketches of the important figures in the bloody conquest of the Old Southwest. Buchanan also does a fine job of explaining the political context of the final battle for Florida, which became a crucial element of Jackson's reputation.
An appealing popular history that is happy to follow various byways to flesh out its portrait of the seventh president’s early years: most readers should be happy to tag along. (17 illustrations, 4 maps)Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-471-28253-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Wiley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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