An extraordinary, fascinating set of firsthand accounts from the revolutionary era.
Poignant documents on the collapse of an old world, mixed with learned commentary: an outstanding work of history.
Isaac (Emeritus, History/La Trobe Univ., Australia) works an annaliste’s dream trove: a set of notebooks kept by a Virginia planter named Landon Carter, a devotee of “habitual diarizing,” who progressed from making cribnotes on parliamentary procedure and agricultural observations to recording wounded personal feelings and grievances against the English crown alike—or, as Isaac nicely puts it, from recording the tumults of the larger world to recording “rebellions in his own little kingdom.” Carter’s troubles are many: his daughter has eloped with the man he has forbidden her to see, and she despises her father because he will not share his fortune with the newlyweds (“I will contrive that she shall not want for Personal necessities, but I will give nothing that either Reuben or his inheritors shall claim”); his son has taken to acting out; his neighbors are saying slanderous things about him; and worse, at the dawn of the American Revolution, his slaves are constantly conspiring against him, and not without reason. As Isaac’s narrative opens, eight of those slaves have stolen a gun, “took my grandson Landon’s Bag of bullets and all the Powder, and went off in my Petty Auger canoe” to sign up with royal governor Lord Dunmore, who has offended planters up and down the Chesapeake Bay with the promise that runaway slaves who joined his Royal Ethiopian Regiment would be granted their freedom. Carter, a learned man fond of reading and quoting from Tristam Shandy, has plenty more difficulties, suspects the world of conspiring against him, and seems well on the way to becoming a cranky old man save for his enthusiasm for the rebel cause. Isaac’s surrounding commentary is intelligent and useful, though old Carter is quite able to speak for himself—and does so, grumpily but affectingly.
An extraordinary, fascinating set of firsthand accounts from the revolutionary era.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-19-515926-8
Page Count: 402
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2004
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
Well-told and admonitory.
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
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