A convincing brief for reconsidering this prescient, fearless public figure.
Wheelan (Invading Mexico: America’s Continental Dream and the Mexican War, 1846–1848, 2007, etc.) gently rehabilitates John Quincy Adams, who after one disastrous presidential term embarked on a long career as the conscience of Congress.
Eldest son of John and Abigail Adams, shapers of Revolutionary America, John Quincy (1767–1848) grew up under the aegis of Franklin and Jefferson, lived in Paris, attended Harvard and was appointed minister to the Netherlands at age 27 by President Washington. Yet he seemed to take pleasure in going against the grain; as his diplomatic career careened into politics, he continually alienated the parties that supported him. His rocky road to the presidency in 1824 was aided by a “corrupt bargain” struck with House Speaker Henry Clay, who threw his support to John Quincy in exchange for the post of Secretary of State. Andrew Jackson exacted his revenge in the election four years later, and Wheelan finally warms to his chilly subject once Adams lost his presidential job at age 61. Prone to depression, he took up writing poetry, until persuaded in 1831 to run for the House seat representing Plymouth, Mass. As the antislavery movement gained force in the 1830s, Congressman Adams introduced numerous petitions from citizens urging the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia. This became his cause célèbre when Congress, hogtied by the powerful Southern states, passed a gag rule that effectively restricted debate on slavery; Adams would fight for eight years to rescind it. He helped delay the annexation of Texas; represented the Amistad mutineers in the Supreme Court; and ensured that the endowment left by James Smithson would become the nation’s Smithsonian Institution. In later years, Adams became a living symbol, the last of the Enlightenment sages and an eloquent spokesman for those denied a voice in government: abolitionists, slaves, Indians and women.
A convincing brief for reconsidering this prescient, fearless public figure.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-78672-012-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2007
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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