More effective as a portrait of the interests of the Colonial planter class than of Washington personally.
A new biography of our first president as viewed through the contents of his library.
If any of the Founding Fathers could not be said to have lived "a life in books," it was George Washington (1732-1799), a thoroughly pragmatic man of action. Washington's library was tiny compared to those of scholar-statesmen like Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin and emphasized practical knowledge rather than political or social philosophy. Most of the evidence that he actually read the books he owned comes from typographical corrections in his own hand. Marginalia relating to content is extremely rare, and Hayes (Emeritus, English/Univ. of Central Oklahoma; A Journey Through American Literature, 2012, etc.) cites few references in Washington's voluminous correspondence to concepts gleaned from his reading. The author offers much supposition about what Washington may have read and how it might have influenced him, but he marshals discouragingly few facts on the point. As a result, this attempt to illuminate Washington through his reading appears doomed from the start. Nevertheless, Hayes gives it his all, surveying a wide array of books and pamphlets in any way connected to Washington, down to textbooks ordered for his stepson and a treatise on cement. In the process, he displays a winning enthusiasm for these now-obscure 18th-century works. He examines not just their content, but also details about their publishing histories, the craftsmanship of their bindings, and how they were filed on the shelves at Mount Vernon. While much of this amounts to a scholarly accumulation of data that conveys little information about the books' owner, in the process a picture gradually emerges of the literary environment of an average wealthy Virginia planter, primarily interested in improving his plantation and in military matters, with little time for fiction or rarified intellectual pursuits.
More effective as a portrait of the interests of the Colonial planter class than of Washington personally.Pub Date: May 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-19-045667-2
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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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