Entertaining and well researched, but less controversial than the publisher’s claims. Wheelan is only one of the recent...
Aaron Burr’s sensational 1807 treason trial makes for good history packed with scandal, courtroom fireworks, and great men behaving badly.
Historians wonder what drove the former vice president to self-destruct. Wheelan (Jefferson’s War, 2003) blames the hostile Chief Executive and makes a reasonable case. Thomas Jefferson picked Burr as running mate in 1800 because he needed to carry New York. A Revolutionary War hero and brilliant lawyer, Burr was a rising, ambitious politician. His positions on slavery and women’s rights were far ahead of his time. He delivered New York, but the election ended in a tie between Burr and Jefferson; in 1800, electors cast two votes but didn’t specify which was for president. The election was thrown into the House of Representatives, dominated by the losing Federalists, whom Burr hoped would prefer him to Jefferson. Yet Wheelan points out that Burr refused overtures from Federalists, while Jefferson made promises that gained their votes. Jefferson then set out to destroy his rival. He denied Burr’s supporters patronage, weakening the vice president’s power base, and chose another running mate in 1804. Trying to recoup, Burr ran for New York governor, but Jefferson worked to ensure his defeat. Popular histories claim Burr’s 1804 duel with Hamilton wrecked his career; Wheelan insists he was ruined before he killed Hamilton. Burr wrote the British government, offering to lead a revolt in the restive states beyond the Appalachians. Getting no response, he eventually organized an expedition that sailed down the Mississippi until Jefferson’s arrest order caught up with him. During the trial, Jefferson peppered the prosecution with advice, some of it illegal and all of it unethical. Unfortunately for Jefferson, Chief Justice John Marshall, a bitter enemy, presided. Marshall’s rulings favored Burr, who was acquitted.
Entertaining and well researched, but less controversial than the publisher’s claims. Wheelan is only one of the recent historians (e.g., Joyce Appleby and John Patrick Diggins) who have begun to separate Jefferson the immortal founding father from Jefferson the man, fiercely ambitious, convinced of his righteousness, and unforgiving of anyone he considered a threat.Pub Date: Feb. 8, 2005
ISBN: 0-7867-1437-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2004
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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