Readers of Thomas Fleming’s Duel (1999) and Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton (2004) might profitably turn to this splendid...
Persuasive reconsideration of possibly the most scandalous figure in American history.
Washington distrusted him. Adams, Jefferson, Madison and Hamilton, despite disagreements among themselves, all loathed him. Is it possible to rehabilitate the historical reputation of Hamilton’s killer, the vice-president indicted for murder, the adventurer tried for treason, the mysterious Aaron Burr? Isenberg (History/Univ. of Tulsa; Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America, 1999, etc.) skillfully submits a brief that her subject, himself an innovative and eloquent attorney, would have been proud to author. From a lineage more distinguished than any other Founder’s (his mother was the daughter of noted Puritan Jonathan Edwards, his father president of the college that became Princeton), Burr was a Revolutionary War hero and later established a thriving legal practice. From the cauldron of New York’s tribal and contentious politics, he emerged as a charismatic leader and an unparalleled organizer whose thoroughly moderate political convictions raised suspicions about his loyalty. Traduced by both Anti-Federalists and Federalists as an “intriguer,” he appears, as Isenberg ably demonstrates, only to have been more forthright in his machinations than his contemporaries. His mastery of the savage politics of his day, she argues, not the invented personal vices reported in the defamatory press, earned him the scorn of thwarted rivals whose names are among the most glittering in American history. In some ways ahead of his time, Burr supported women’s rights and pushed for reconciliation of the new nation’s agrarian and commercial interests. He was, however, distinctly 18th-century in his insistence on points of personal honor that led to the infamous duel at Weehawken and in his enthusiasm for speculation, a fever shared by Washington and Hamilton. This last partially explains his Mexican adventure, the consequent 1807 treason trial and his self-imposed European exile following acquittal. Amazingly, he returned to New York to practice law for many years before dying in 1836.
Readers of Thomas Fleming’s Duel (1999) and Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton (2004) might profitably turn to this splendid biography for a necessary and overdue corrective.Pub Date: May 14, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-670-06352-9
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2007
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he...
The latest from French writer/filmmaker Carrère (My Life as a Russian Novel, 2010, etc.) is an awkward but intermittently touching hybrid of novel and autobiography.
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he describes powerfully. Carrère and his partner, Hélène, then return to Paris—and do so with a mutual devotion that's been renewed and deepened by all they've witnessed. Back in France, Hélène's sister Juliette, a magistrate and mother of three small daughters, has suffered a recurrence of the cancer that crippled her in adolescence. After her death, Carrère decides to write an oblique tribute and an investigation into the ravages of grief. He focuses first on Juliette's colleague and intimate friend Étienne, himself an amputee and survivor of childhood cancer, and a man in whose talkativeness and strength Carrère sees parallels to himself ("He liked to talk about himself. It's my way, he said, of talking to and about others, and he remarked astutely that it was my way, too”). Étienne is a perceptive, dignified person and a loyal, loving friend, and Carrère's portrait of him—including an unexpectedly fascinating foray into Étienne and Juliette's chief professional accomplishment, which was to tap the new European courts for help in overturning longtime French precedents that advantaged credit-card companies over small borrowers—is impressive. Less successful is Carrère's account of Juliette's widower, Patrice, an unworldly cartoonist whom he admires for his fortitude but seems to consider something of a simpleton. Now and again, especially in the Étienne sections, Carrère's meditations pay off in fresh, pungent insights, and his account of Juliette's last days and of the aftermath (especially for her daughters) is quietly harrowing.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9261-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
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