A discerning history of pre-Revolutionary America and the man who shaped its future.
As a young man, the eminent Founding Father was impetuous, thin-skinned, and prone to anger and paranoia.
“Perhaps the strongest feature in his character was prudence,” Thomas Jefferson remarked about the venerable Washington (1732-1799). Abigail Adams described him as “dignity with ease,” and her husband, John Adams, noted his “great self-command.” But as Outside correspondent Stark (Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire: A Story of Wealth, Ambition, and Survival, 2014, etc.) portrays him in his lively, well-researched biography, Washington in his 20s was far different: “ambitious, temperamental, vain,” and stubborn. “When thwarted,” he was quick to erupt in “explosive anger.” Acutely sensitive to any “threat to his honor or pride,” his first reaction was to quit. Born into a family that never rose above “the second tier” of Virginia society, Washington coveted status and wealth, looking to military command as a way to gain acceptance by the Colonial elite. His goal—never realized—was to be awarded a commission by the king. Stark follows Washington’s career as he rose from part-time junior officer, serving Virginia Gov. Robert Dinwiddie, to colonel, overseeing motley, undisciplined, underfunded soldiers. The author conveys in gritty detail the challenges of 18th-century conflict: an untamed frontier, violent Indians, chigger attacks, torrential rains, lack of food and arms, dysentery, and deserters. Tasked with preventing the French incursion into the Ohio Valley, Washington failed spectacularly; inexperienced in military strategy, he “watched dumbfounded in horror” as Indians who agreed to aid his troops fell murderously upon French soldiers, slicing off their scalps as trophies. The bloody massacre, Stark asserts, led to the protracted French and Indian War. Nevertheless, in 1755, after he bravely aided a wounded British general, Washington earned a reputation as a fearless hero. Just as significant, he came to believe that he was protected by divine forces, “for some greater purpose.” Gradually realizing his responsibility to protect vulnerable settlers, he grew in empathy, selflessness, and determination to serve others.
A discerning history of pre-Revolutionary America and the man who shaped its future.Pub Date: May 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-241606-3
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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