This biography demythologizes the legendary Shawnee chief while still according him mythic stature. In popular culture, Tecumseh is a tragic symbol of the American Indian: a brilliant and charismatic leader who tried against impossible odds in the early 1800s to unite dozens of tribes against the steady march of American settlement into their historic lands. British Historian Sugden (Sir Francis Drake, 1991, etc.) has spent 30 years searching for the real Tecumseh, but, for all that, in the end he delivers a portrait remarkably similar to popular perceptions. Sugden’s Tecumseh was a remarkable man who rose to eminence at the precise historical moment when a thousand years of Native American life east of the Mississippi were coming to an end. Tecumseh did nothing to change what happened to the Indians. Indians who rallied to his defiant cause and those who decided instead to do whatever the Americans asked shared precisely the same fate: loss of lands and culture and eventual forced removal. But even by the time of Tecumseh’s death in 1813 in battle against future US president William Henry Harrison, his enemies were describing Tecumseh as the noble embodiment of the best of the American Indian and as the tragic embodiment of the Indians’ fate. Cowed by Tecumseh’s already mythic stature, an American general chose not to take him and his British allies on in the early days of the War of 1812, when an American victory might have led to the fall of Canada. To make Tecumseh’s story read even more like a Hollywood script, his brother was the Prophet, leader of a religious reform movement among the Shawnee that was another desperate, and ultimately futile, expression of Indian resistance. Sugden has written that rare biography that documents and justifies its worshipfulness. Tecumseh was not well served by history, but history is well served by him. (32 pages photos, maps, not seen)
Pub Date: April 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-8050-4138-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1998
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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