A revisionist life of the Founding Father, motes and warts and all.
No stranger to scandal himself, Ellis (Founding Brothers, 2000, etc.) begins by addressing George Washington’s education in the school of hard knocks with tomahawks. Having lost his father early and having attained only a grade-school education, Washington was pressed into work on Virginia’s western frontier, “the far edge of civilization’s progress,” beyond which “anything that Europeans called civilization ceased to exist altogether.” Exploring the territory along the Ohio River apparently taught him a thing or two about Indian fighting, though, as Ellis notes, the documentary evidence for this period is scant; whatever the case, by the time he reached his early 20s, Washington was serving in the Virginia militia and found himself overseeing the first engagement of the French and Indian War—unhappily, a massacre of French soldiers attempting to surrender. Other debacles followed, after which Washington, by Ellis’s account, came both to disdain the British officer class and to believe that he himself could not be killed. Retiring from service, he returned to Virginia and married Martha Custis—even though, Ellis writes, he was in love with Sally Fairfax, the wife of a friend. As a slaveholding plantation owner, he soon worked his way through much of Martha’s inherited wealth and took to borrowing money, which caught him “in the trap that was snaring other Virginia planters and that Thomas Jefferson, another victim, described as the chronic condition of indebtedness.” Ever litigious and ready to blame others, Washington attributed his economic woes to the misdoings of the British Empire in America, and a revolutionary was born. So, too, was the regal general who insisted on being called “His Excellency” and who “lost more battles than any victorious general in modern history,” but who also “surrounded himself with the most intellectually sophisticated collection of statesmen in American presidential history” and forged a republic.
“A modest-sized book about a massive historical subject,” Ellis calls it. Well done, too, though admirers of Washington may find in it more—or less—than they bargained for.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-4031-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2004
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | POLITICAL & ROYALTY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
Did you like this book?
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
Did you like this book?
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
Did you like this book?
© Copyright 2023 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
