A fresh perspective on Colonial America.
A sympathetic look at George Washington’s mother.
Saxton (Emerita, History and Women’s Studies/Amherst Coll.; Being Good: Women’s Moral Values in Early America, 2002, etc.) believes that Washington’s biographers have treated Mary Ball Washington (1708-1789) unfairly. “The caricature of an incompetent, crude, imperious, selfish, and unloving woman flowered fully in the 1940s and ’50s,” Saxton writes, a portrait based on scant evidence and shaped by sentimental maternal stereotypes. Steeped in Colonial history, the author takes on a formidable project: to uncover the shards of Mary’s life, place her in the context of her times, and tease apart “the biographical fates of mother and son” in order to give Mary “the dignity of her independent existence.” Saxton offers a sensitive, sharply drawn portrait of a resourceful woman whose early losses made her anxious and fearful for life. By the time she was an adolescent, her father, stepfather, half brother, and mother all had died. After 11 years of marriage, she became a widowed mother of five, facing financial instability. “Trauma,” Saxton observes, “was Mary’s normality.” As an old woman, one evening, during a thunderstorm, her daughter found her praying alone: “my trust is in God,” Mary confessed, “but sometimes my fears are stronger than my faith.” Her fears led her to be overprotective of her children, not least her eldest son, George. When he was 14, Mary strongly opposed his desire to join the British navy as a midshipman—“a singularly dangerous institution,” Saxton notes. Mary prevailed but later found herself repeatedly at odds with her son’s “aggressive, restless, and risk-taking spirit” as well as his vanity and stinginess. Besides closely examining Mary’s relationships with various members of her extended family, Saxton mostly succeeds in the challenge of treating fairly Mary’s role as a demanding, often cruel, slaveholder who tried to project strength and authority through “force, name-calling, and abuse.” Her religious beliefs validated that treatment: “violence,” Mary thought, “could justifiably produce obedience,” and obedience led to moral behavior. Like others of her time and class, slavery shaped her identity.
A fresh perspective on Colonial America.Pub Date: June 11, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8090-9701-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
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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