A new study that defends the South’s greatest icon against the negative assessment promulgated by such revisionist biographies as Thomas Connelly’s The Marble Man (1977). Taylor (William Henry Seward, 1991, etc.) depicts Robert E. Lee as a quiet, dignified, courteous figure. The son of George Washington’s general “Light Horse Harry” Lee, he performed brilliantly as a young West Point—trained officer in the Mexican War. He learned under General Winfield Scott that a well-led small force could defeat a larger foe, that planning, reconnaissance, audacity, seizing the initiative, and acting decisively were vitally important. Lee deplored slavery and said he had no respect for those who would destroy the Union, yet he sided with the secessionists as a loyal citizen of Virginia. He was a man of contradictions: modest, thoughtful, and realistic in many ways, yet dangerously romantic about the “glory” of dying in battle. Lee was criticized for achieving victories at very high cost and continuing a hopeless struggle largely to vindicate his own honor at the expense of thousands of lives. Taylor blames Lee’s subordinates for not following his often vague orders. The South suffered decisive defeats at Gettysburg, Vicksburg, and New Orleans at the hands of more powerful Federal forces. Lee appears to have lost control of the battle of Gettysburg, where Taylor finds the general over-confident after Confederate success on the first day, making decisions that resulted in the loss of one-third of his army. Lincoln’s reelection in 1864 signaled the end of the rebellion, although Lee’s diehard fight continued the carnage in service to the Lost Cause as his army melted away from casualties and desertions. Useful and easy reading, this evaluation of Lee as a gifted soldier and a Christian gentleman of character and humility does not provide many new insights nor convincingly refute the claims of Lee’s critics.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-57488-183-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1999
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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