Overlong, but still the best life of Hay that we have and a persuasive argument for taking another look at the life of a...
An overstuffed biography of an overlooked American statesman and reluctant politician.
If you’re a political scientist, American historian or fan of 19th-century Republicanism, you have likely heard of John Hay (1838–1905). If you’re a tourist in Washington, you likely have passed by the Hay-Adams Hotel, across the street from St. John’s Church, where presidents go to pray. Former Newsweek editor Taliaferro (In a Far Country: The True Story of a Mission, a Marriage, and the Remarkable Reindeer Rescue of 1898, 2006, etc.) finds in Hay a subject worthy of wider circulation. Hay, from the minor aristocracy of small-town Illinois, began his professional career as a secretary to Abraham Lincoln, close enough to the action that he traveled with the president to Gettysburg and there recorded that Lincoln “said his half dozen lines of consecration and the music wailed and we went home.” By association with his friend Robert Lincoln, the president’s son, Hay came to be one of the fallen leader’s first biographers—but also a servant of Republican presidents thereafter, one who long “had sworn that he never would run for office, but even in his adamance, he gave hints that he was wavering.” Hay’s apogee came with service as secretary of state to Theodore Roosevelt, who signed up Hay for a second term without even consulting him—but he served till the end of his life, saying, “it would be a scandal to contradict him.” Taliaferro inclines toward too much completeness. The story of how the Panama Canal came to be is an intriguing one and worthy of a book itself, though here, its political complexities tend to burden an otherwise quickly flowing narrative, which moves even faster when friends of Hay, such as Mark Twain and Henry Adams, are part of it.
Overlong, but still the best life of Hay that we have and a persuasive argument for taking another look at the life of a career public servant.Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-1416597308
Page Count: 672
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
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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