A skilled historian, Kukla has done his homework and written a detailed, lively, probably definitive biography of a...
A new biography of the American statesman who Thomas Jefferson said “was our leader in the measures of the Revolution in Virginia.”
Most Americans know little about Patrick Henry (1736-1799) aside from his proclamation during a speech: “Give me liberty, or give me death!” He deserves better, and historian Kukla (Mr. Jefferson’s Women, 2007, etc.) has written a compelling biography that serves his subject well. The son of a Virginia planter who became a lawyer, Henry proved a pugnacious advocate and superb speaker at a time when oratory was valued far more than it is today. Elected to the Virginia legislature in 1765, he arrived as it received the final text of the notorious Stamp Act. Almost immediately, Henry proposed resolutions asserting that Colonial legislatures, not Parliament, had exclusive right to tax the Colonies. These were more inflammatory than similar responses in other Colonies and widely admired, and the author considers them a major catalyst of the Revolution. Henry continued to attack Britain and served in the Continental Congress until 1776, when he became Virginia’s first post-Revolution governor, serving six one-year terms. He worked hard for the Revolution, but like most Americans (although not most of the elite) after 1783, he felt no need for a strong central government. Henry was not an intellectual like Adams, Jefferson, and Madison or a respected general like Washington. He was an agitator, similar to Samuel Adams. He played a central role in stirring up rebellion, a lesser role once the revolution began, and he did not help his reputation by leading Virginia’s opposition to ratifying the Constitution.
A skilled historian, Kukla has done his homework and written a detailed, lively, probably definitive biography of a revolutionary figure who merits more recognition but perhaps not promotion beyond the second tier of Founding Fathers.Pub Date: July 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4391-9081-4
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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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