An inspirational tale of how suffering bred a visionary of hard-won wisdom.
A significant contribution to the study of Lincoln and his battle with depression that will resonate with contemporary Americans.
To some extent, Shenk (Unholy Ghost, not reviewed, etc.) exaggerates historians’ longtime discounting of Lincoln’s depression—after all, the President’s careworn face is iconic. To his credit, however, he never resorts to thinly-sourced speculations or clichés about Oedipal triangles that have made psychobiography a four-letter word among mainstream historians. This account illuminates a troubled soul who persevered in spite of depression. Two nervous breakdowns in Lincoln’s mid-20s and early 30s led him not only to fear for his sanity but even contemplate suicide. “Lincoln said that he could kill himself, that he was not afraid to die,” the author writes. “Yet, he said, he had an ‘irrepressible desire’ to accomplish something while he lived.” That “something” was helping end slavery in the United States. It was “a temperamental inclination to see and prepare for the worst,” according to Shenk, that allowed Lincoln to recognize slavery as the cancer devouring the Union. Perseverance and forbearance created a tough-minded yet compassionate leader who understood his and the nation’s imperfections without accepting their permanence. Offering a plausible explanation for the evolution of Lincoln’s depression from episodic to chronic, Shenk shows how personal conflicts (the death of Lincoln’s mother, for example) interacted with professional disappointments (failed bids to become a state legislator and congressman) to forge a politician who admitted to being “the most miserable man living” even as he reached for greatness.
An inspirational tale of how suffering bred a visionary of hard-won wisdom.Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2005
ISBN: 0-618-55116-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
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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