Though well-researched and engagingly presented, Peraino’s materials include too little new information about Lincoln to add...
In his workmanlike debut, veteran journalist Peraino examines Abraham Lincoln’s role in American foreign policy, “one of the few sparsely stocked corners of an otherwise massive library.”
As is well-known, Lincoln was occupied with pressing domestic matters for his entire administration and largely left the conduct of foreign policy to Secretary of State William Seward. As president, Lincoln had only two overriding foreign policy goals: to keep the nation out of wars with foreign powers and to keep other nations from recognizing the Confederacy. Even the first of these was difficult, as there was a widely held notion that a foreign war might help resolve the Civil War, and public opinion was inflamed by several international crises during this period. These included a clash with Great Britain over the Trent Affair and the French invasion of Mexico in support of the puppet emperor Maximilian. Peraino treats both at length, crediting Lincoln with encouraging journalists to prepare the public for a necessary but embarrassing climb-down over Trent. Discouraging foreign intervention in our own war, particularly by Britain, where thousands of textile workers were idled by a cotton shortage, required further subtle skill. The author argues that it was accomplished in large part by Lincoln’s gradual transition to emancipation as a war goal, which had a greater moral appeal to the European public than preserving a union that tolerated slavery. This was an approach advanced by, among others, Karl Marx, London correspondent for Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune. Finally, however, it detracts nothing from Lincoln’s glory to observe that the author’s view of him as “one of America’s seminal foreign-policy presidents” is something of a stretch. Peraino never fully brings into focus the contours of a distinctly Lincolnian foreign policy.
Though well-researched and engagingly presented, Peraino’s materials include too little new information about Lincoln to add much to readers’ understanding of the 16th president.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-307-88720-7
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2013
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
SEEN & HEARD
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