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
Told with mettle and intelligence, Sebold’s story of fierce determination to wrest back her life from her rapist will...
A stunningly crafted and unsparing account of the author’s rape as a college freshman and what it took to win her case in court.
In 1981, Sebold was brutally raped on her college campus, at Syracuse University. Sebold, a New York Times Magazinecontributor, now in her 30s, reconstructs the rape and the year following in which her assailant was brought to trial and found guilty. When, months after the rape, she confided in her fiction professor, Tobias Wolff, he advised: “Try, if you can, to remember everything.” Sebold heeded his words, and the result is a memoir that reads like detective fiction, replete with police jargon, economical characterization, and film-like scene construction. Part of Sebold’s ironic luck, besides the fact that she wasn’t killed, was that she was a virgin prior to the rape, she was wearing bulky clothing, and her rapist beat her, leaving unmistakable evidence of violence. Sebold casts a cool eye on these facts: “The cosmetics of rape are central to proving any case.” Sebold critiques the sexism and misconceptions surrounding rape with neither rhetoric nor apology; she lets her experience speak for itself. Her family, her friends, her campus community are all shaken by the brutality she survived, yet Sebold finds herself feeling more affinity with police officers she meets, as it was “in [their] world where this hideous thing had happened to me. A world of violent crime.” Just when Sebold believes she might surface from this world, a close friend is raped and the haunting continues. The last section, “Aftermath,” has an unavoidable tacked-on-at-the-end feel, as Sebold crams over a decade’s worth of coping and healing into a short chapter.
Told with mettle and intelligence, Sebold’s story of fierce determination to wrest back her life from her rapist will inspire and challenge.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-684-85782-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Jan. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1999
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An educational and inspiring biography of seminal American innovators.
A charmingly pared-down life of the “boys” that grounds their dream of flight in decent character and work ethic.
There is a quiet, stoical awe to the accomplishments of these two unprepossessing Ohio brothers in this fluently rendered, skillfully focused study by two-time Pulitzer Prize–winning and two-time National Book Award–winning historian McCullough (The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris, 2011, etc.). The author begins with a brief yet lively depiction of the Wright home dynamic: reeling from the death of their mother from tuberculosis in 1889, the three children at home, Wilbur, Orville, and Katharine, had to tend house, as their father, an itinerant preacher, was frequently absent. McCullough highlights the intellectual stimulation that fed these bookish, creative, close-knit siblings. Wilbur was the most gifted, yet his parents’ dreams of Yale fizzled after a hockey accident left the boy with a mangled jaw and broken teeth. The boys first exhibited their mechanical genius in their print shop and then in their bicycle shop, which allowed them the income and space upstairs for machine-shop invention. Dreams of flight were reawakened by reading accounts by Otto Lilienthal and other learned treatises and, specifically, watching how birds flew. Wilbur’s dogged writing to experts such as civil engineer Octave Chanute and the Smithsonian Institute provided advice and response, as others had long been preoccupied by controlled flight. Testing their first experimental glider took the Wrights over several seasons to Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, to experiment with their “wing warping” methods. There, the strange, isolated locals marveled at these most “workingest boys,” and the brothers continually reworked and repaired at every step. McCullough marvels at their success despite a lack of college education, technical training, “friends in high places” or “financial backers”—they were just boys obsessed by a dream and determined to make it reality.
An educational and inspiring biography of seminal American innovators.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4767-2874-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
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