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ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE

DEMOCRACY’S GUIDE

A cogent and satisfying primer on the mind of the perspicacious Gallic theorist who discerned a new form of government in...

Essayist Epstein (Friendship, 2006, etc.) presents his take on America’s most quoted, least vexing Frenchman in this latest addition to the Eminent Lives series.

In 1831, 26-year-old Count Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville, aristocratic in blood and mien, sailed to the new United States on a voyage of discovery. In less than a year, Tocqueville and his friend Beaumont traveled from Niagara to Nashville, Boston to Pittsburgh, studying America’s penal system. The visitors met an emergent middle class, venal politicians, doomed Native Americans, the humble and the eminent. They saw a central government and a federation of states joined in a new form of government. What Tocqueville discovered was equality. Back home, not yet 30, he embarked on his masterwork, Democracy in America. The two-volume work, published in 1835 and 1840, was a sociological prototype and a triumph of political thought. Epstein provides samples of its frequently prescient analysis. A democratic people, Tocqueville noted, would always find two things difficult: “to start a war and to finish it.” Were despotism to gain a foothold in democratic nations, he remarked, “it would be more extensive and more mild, and it would degrade men without tormenting them.” Expressed in lucid, remarkably nimble prose, his political philosophy has been accessed by liberals and conservatives, democrats and gentry. As Epstein reminds us, Tocqueville’s causes were always liberty and human dignity. Though he served as a deputy in the government of Louis-Philippe, he witnessed and reported with measured sympathy on the upheavals of 1848. The Old Regime was published in three years before his death in 1859, but he never completed his assessment of the French Revolution or Napoleon.

A cogent and satisfying primer on the mind of the perspicacious Gallic theorist who discerned a new form of government in America.

Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-059898-0

Page Count: 208

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2006

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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INTO THE WILD

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)

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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