A well-written, thorough scrutiny of a landmark speech that illustrated Lincoln’s vision and clarified his future purposes.
Johnson (History/Miami Univ.; The Dreyfus Affair: Honor and Politics in the Belle Époque, 1999) analyzes how, when, where and by whom the Gettysburg Address was written.
The author ably debunks the myth of Lincoln scribbling a few words on the back of a yellow envelope on the train to the Pennsylvania cemetery dedication. “It seemed odd that the origins and writing of a speech that had become such an important part of American identity should be surrounded by so many questions,” he writes. Lincoln scholars and Civil War buffs will be delighted with Johnson’s meticulous investigation of the few days Lincoln had to prepare a “few appropriate remarks” at the site of the battle that was the turning point of the Civil War. There is barely an hour for which he doesn’t specify Lincoln’s location or to whom he spoke. There is no doubt that the president wrote the first draft of a two-page text in Washington, D.C. The second page disappeared the day before the dedication, and a pencil-written page took its place, forming the Nicolay (named after Lincoln’s private secretary, John George Nicolay) or delivery text copy. Lincoln went away to revise his speech at least twice after his arrival in Gettysburg and also made revisions as he delivered the speech. The author carefully compares not only the five handwritten copies, but also the many post-delivery documents and revisions. Even Lincoln wrote out a revision, based on many of the iterations that were available. Focusing on involved persons, word changes, capitalization and even paragraph breaks, Johnson has exhausted every possible facet of this speech and the people who may have suggested words or phrases.
A well-written, thorough scrutiny of a landmark speech that illustrated Lincoln’s vision and clarified his future purposes.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-7006-1933-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Univ. Press of Kansas
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2013
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 2025 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.
