A concise, well-researched biography of a self-righteous, opinionated man who embodied the convictions and contradictions of...
The political and moral views of the man who wrote “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
Francis Scott Key (1779-1843) was an influential lawyer, serving for eight years as a district attorney. As historian Leepson (Lafayette: Lessons in Leadership from the Idealist General, 2011, etc.) portrays him, Key was devoutly religious, politically conservative and ardently patriotic. He opposed the American invasion of Canada that began the War of 1812, calling the war “a lump of wickedness,” but by September 1814, after witnessing bombs bursting, rockets hissing and cannonballs rumbling when the British attacked Baltimore, his patriotism overwhelmed him. Seeing the American flag flying after the British retreated, he penned the verses that became the nation’s anthem. Days later, the poem was published in a Baltimore newspaper, indicating that it was to be sung “to the tune of ‘To Anacreon in Heaven,’ ” a popular English song well known in America. Key was also involved directly in the crucial issue of his time: slavery. A slaveholder himself, he defended in court both slaves seeking their freedom and owners refusing to release their human property. He was a founder and proselytizing member of the American Colonization Society, whose mission was to encourage emancipated slaves to settle in Africa. Key resented the abolitionist movement, believing that freed slaves posed a threat of unrest, and would foment rebellion against slaveholders. Besides his tireless work for the ACS, Key founded the American Bible Society and served as its vice president, and he was a supporter of the American Tract Society, which published and distributed Christian literature aimed to convert nonbelievers. Although Key was a “tepid Federalist who loathed partisan politics,” he became an avid proponent of Andrew Jackson, sympathetic to his campaign against government corruption and his desire to limit federal intrusion into states’ affairs.
A concise, well-researched biography of a self-righteous, opinionated man who embodied the convictions and contradictions of his tumultuous times.Pub Date: June 24, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-137-27828-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
