A warm, poignant picture of the relationship between Theodore Roosevelt and his six remarkable children, based on previously unpublished family letters, papers, and interviews. Renehan (John Burroughs: An American Naturalist, 1992) finds that all the children of T.R., especially his four sons, grew up in the heady light of their father’s dashing charge up San Juan Ridge at Santiago, Cuba, during the Spanish-American War: The young Roosevelts were taught to fight for an honorable cause with a great sense of duty; boys and girls alike —absorbed or inherited his reckless, all-or-nothing approach to hazards.— Ethel, a daughter who observed the pain of battle while serving in a Paris military hospital, felt that the family’s happiness at Sagamore Hill in Oyster Bay, Long Island, would be offset by their sad (if heroic) experiences during the Great War. The two oldest boys, Theodore Jr., and Archie, were indeed both seriously wounded; Quentin, the baby of the family, would be killed in aerial combat. T.R.’s martial, patriotic spirit undeniably lived on in his children, though he was saddened by the simultaneous deaths of his wife, Alice, and of his mother. He was never the same after the demise of Quentin. Even so, his equally beloved second wife, Edith, sustained him in his last illness. Renehan’s research leaves us with the portrait of a dearly loved father and grandfather who doted on his children without spoiling them and became an unforgettable role model. A postscript: Both Ted Jr., and Kermit died in uniform in WWII. Ted Jr. won the Medal of Honor in Normandy for leading his men ashore. An unusual view of the human side of an extraordinary public figure. (Book-of-the-Month Club/History Book Club alternate selection; author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-19-512719-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1998
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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