An intimate, richly detailed portrait of a powerful political figure.
The formative experiences that shaped a political mind.
John Quincy Adams (1767-1848) began keeping a diary when he was 11 years old, a project that resulted in tens of thousands of pages. To produce this perceptive biography, Levin (Edith and Woodrow: The Wilson White House, 2001, etc.) has judiciously mined that abundant material, along with Adams’ prolific correspondence and his wife’s memoirs. Although considered by contemporaries “a frigid and icy New Englander,” Adams, as the author portrays him, was a passionate man, often lonely, self-critical and exacting of others (Thomas Jefferson, for one, who seemed to Adams shifty and calculating). Besides revealing his emotions and intellectual growth, his diary offers a vivid record of the tumultuous political events that he witnessed, including the American Revolution, Louisiana Purchase and Napoleon’s doomed invasion of Russia. Adams made his first trip to Europe in 1778, as his father’s companion and secretary, and at age 14, he accompanied Ambassador Francis Dana to Russia, interpreting peace negotiations conducted in French. By the time Adams enrolled at Harvard, he was a worldly young man but had no clear direction. Following his father’s advice, he began a legal apprenticeship in the small town of Newburyport, where, isolated and anxious about his future, he plummeted into overwhelming depression—an affliction that would recur throughout his life. His parents, the estimable John and Abigail, had high hopes for their son. If he achieved anything less than professional prominence, they told him, “it will be owing to your own laziness, slovenliness, and obstinacy.” As a minister to The Hague, London, Prussia and Russia, senator from Massachusetts, secretary of state under James Monroe and professor of rhetoric at Harvard, Adams had no lack of achievement and honors. Levin focuses on his education—as a lawyer, statesman, husband and father—ending in 1815, with major roles yet before him.
An intimate, richly detailed portrait of a powerful political figure.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-1137279620
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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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