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BECOMING MADISON

Name: BECOMING MADISON
Author: Michael Signer
ISBN: 978-1-61039-295-2

THE EXTRAORDINARY ORIGINS OF THE LEAST LIKELY FOUNDING FATHER

by Michael Signer ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015

A perfect introduction to a deeply private and immensely important man.

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An attorney and author looks at the early life and career of our fourth president.

Though he’s the principal architect of our constitutional form of government, James Madison (1751-1836) remains, for most Americans, the least distinct of all the Founders, better known as Hamilton’s and Jay’s co-author, as Jefferson’s lieutenant, as the beguiling Dolley’s husband. In this highly readable and often insightful treatment, Signer (Demagogue: The Fight to Save America from Its Worst Enemies, 2009, etc.) colors in the portrait, finding the essential Madison in the young man as he charts the diminutive Virginian’s “evolving character and his emerging ideas.” A remarkably intense, indefatigably hardworking youth, Madison mastered self-control in part to mask his raw sensitivity and frail health. Signer convincingly diagnoses his infirmity—contra Madison biographer Lynne Cheney—as “severe anxiety-driven panic attacks that made him ill.” Despite this weakness, he consciously set out to become a statesman, regularly asserting himself in the public, rough-and-tumble world of politics, using, oftentimes anonymously, the power of his ideas and the elegance of his pen to shape the debate. With a character influenced by his father, his tutor, and especially his college president, the Presbyterian cleric John Witherspoon, Madison drew ideas from his voluminous reading and all-encompassing scholarship. Finding the Socratic method distasteful and inadequate, he fashioned his own search for truth and developed it into a singular political strategy. Signer describes Madison’s method as an “interlocking set of nine tactics” that primarily emphasized ideas, preparation, timing, and, most of all, the quelling of passion in oneself and one’s opponent. The author offers some dramatic set pieces demonstrating Madison’s method in action—the 1784 fight against religious assessments in Virginia, the Constitutional Convention, the Virginia ratification battle, etc.—illustrating its effectiveness against more conventional tactics and politicians. He’s particularly good at showing how Madison’s discipline, relentless logic and faith in reason allowed him to triumph over his in-state antagonist, Patrick Henry.

A perfect introduction to a deeply private and immensely important man.

Pub Date: March 10, 2015

ISBN: 978-1-61039-295-2

Page Count: 384

Publisher: PublicAffairs

Review Posted Online: Jan. 3, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2015

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HISTORY | POLITICAL & ROYALTY | UNITED STATES

- BOOK REVIEW
CRY HAVOC
by Michael Signer

- BOOK REVIEW
DEMAGOGUE
by Michael Signer

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)