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
A dazzling visual homage to a music icon gone too soon.
A Los Angeles–based photographer pays tribute to a legendary musician with anecdotes and previously unseen images collected from their 25-year collaboration.
St. Nicholas (co-author: Whitney: Tribute to an Icon, 2012, etc.) first met Prince in 1991 at a prearranged photo shoot. “The dance between photographer and subject carried us away into hours of inspired photographs…and the beginning of a friendship that would last a lifetime.” In this book, the author fondly remembers their many professional encounters in the 25 years that followed. Many would be portrait sessions but done on impulse, like those in a burned-out Los Angeles building in 1994 and on the Charles Bridge in Prague in 2007. Both times, the author and Prince came together through serendipity to create playfully expressive images that came to represent the singer’s “unorthodox ability to truly live life in the moment.” Other encounters took place while Prince was performing at Paisley Park, his Minneapolis studio, or at venues in LA, New York, Tokyo, and London. One in particular came about after the 1991 release of Prince’s Diamonds and Pearls album and led to the start of St. Nicholas’ career as a video director. Prince, who nurtured young artists throughout his career, pushed the author to “trust my instincts…expand myself creatively.” What is most striking about even the most intimate of these photographs—even those shot with Mayte Garcia, the fan-turned–backup dancer who became Prince’s wife in 1996—is the brilliantly theatrical quality of the images. As the author observes, the singer was never not the self-conscious artist: “Prince was Prince 24/7.” Nostalgic and reverential, this book—the second St. Nicholas produced with/for Prince—is a celebration of friendship and artistry. Prince fans are sure to appreciate the book, and those interested in art photography will also find the collection highly appealing.
A dazzling visual homage to a music icon gone too soon.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-293923-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
Unsurprising but perfectly competent and seamlessly of a piece with her Living History (2003). And will Hillary run? The...
Former Secretary of State Clinton tells—well, if not all, at least what she and her “book team” think we ought to know.
If this memoir of diplomatic service lacks the preening self-regard of Henry Kissinger’s and the technocratic certainty of Dean Acheson’s, it has all the requisite evenhandedness: Readers have the sense that there’s not a sentence in it that hasn’t been vetted, measured and adjusted for maximal blandness. The news that has thus far made the rounds has concerned the author’s revelation that the Clintons were cash-strapped on leaving the White House, probably since there’s not enough hanging rope about Benghazi for anyone to get worked up about. (On that current hot-button topic, the index says, mildly, “See Libya.”) The requisite encomia are there, of course: “Losing these fearless public servants in the line of duty was a crushing blow.” So are the crises and Clinton’s careful qualifying: Her memories of the Benghazi affair, she writes, are a blend of her own experience and information gathered in the course of the investigations that followed, “especially the work of the independent review board charged with determining the facts and pulling no punches.” When controversy appears, it is similarly cushioned: Tinhorn dictators are valuable allies, and everyone along the way is described with the usual honorifics and flattering descriptions: “Benazir [Bhutto] wore a shalwar kameez, the national dress of Pakistan, a long, flowing tunic over loose pants that was both practical and attractive, and she covered her hair with lovely scarves.” In short, this is a standard-issue political memoir, with its nods to “adorable students,” “important partners,” the “rich history and culture” of every nation on the planet, and the difficulty of eating and exercising sensibly while logging thousands of hours in flight and in conference rooms.
Unsurprising but perfectly competent and seamlessly of a piece with her Living History (2003). And will Hillary run? The guiding metaphor of the book is the relay race, and there’s a sense that if the torch is handed to her, well….Pub Date: June 10, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-5144-3
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
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