Indian State historian Williams (A Great and Shining Road, 1988) presents one of the most colorful figures of the early days of the American West as a flawed hero and failed family man—but also as an unswerving supporter of the republic that he guided into the US. Born in 1793 in western Virginia, Houston distanced himself from his family at an early age, living among the Cherokee as a teenager and maintaining their trust even after he developed his lifelong passion for alcohol. Wounded in an attack against Creek rebels, he recovered sufficiently to become a member of Congress and then governor of Tennessee before the age of 35, but habitual drunkenness and a scandal involving his wife led to his resignation as governor in 1829. Soon attracted to the possibility of carving a new nation from northern Mexico, Houston became involved in schemes to settle the territory with Americans, provoking a strong response from Mexican general Santa Anna. Seizing the proper moment, now-General Houston led a charge against the Mexican army, defeating it soundly though receiving a painful wound. Acclaimed as a hero, Houston became the first president of the Republic of Texas and steered it on a quiet but steady course toward annexation by the US (accomplished in 1845) while attempting to stay clear of the growing controversy over slavery. As a US senator and, later, governor of Texas, Houston held to a moderate course, trying above all to keep Texas in the Union—but to no avail. In 1863, two years after Texas joined the Confederacy, Houston died, broken and impoverished. Well-detailed but somewhat pedestrian history in which Houston emerges only intermittently from his context; still, a valuable look at the forces behind the formation of Texas and its pivotal role in US expansion from coast to coast. (B&w photos—not seen.)
Pub Date: Jan. 25, 1993
ISBN: 0-671-74641-3
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1992
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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