For years now, Brookhiser has helped bring the Founders back to life, precisely Lincoln’s purpose as the president...
An author who specializes in biographies of the Founders looks at their influence on our 16th president.
Only two of the men who fought in the Revolution, wrote the Declaration and framed the Constitution remained alive as Lincoln reached his 20s. By the time he departed Springfield in 1861, the president-elect had spent his political maturity pondering the lessons of the Founders, teasing out the principles that informed them as he faced a task he deemed “greater than George Washington’s”—holding together a dangerously fragile union. Famously self-made, Lincoln learned most of what he knew from books. Byron, Shakespeare and the Bible account for the touches of poetry in his prose; to Euclid goes partial credit for the rigorous logic underpinning his arguments. The Founders, however, became Lincoln’s most reliable instructors: Thomas Paine for plainspoken proofs; Washington as a model of virtue and for his love of liberty; the problematic Jefferson for the Declaration’s perfect expression of the American purpose. National Review senior editor Brookhiser (James Madison, 2011, etc.) touches on many other influences that shaped Lincoln’s mind, even throwing a little credit to Thomas Lincoln (something Abraham never did) for his son’s talent for storytelling. If the author’s attempt to link the figure of John Wilkes Booth to the dreaded and destructive “towering genius” prophesized in Lincoln’s 1838 Lyceum Address doesn’t quite work, his discussion of the second inaugural is genuinely moving and instructive. The narrative always smoothly returns, though, to the Founders and Lincoln’s unceasing attempt to divine their intentions and to examine the institutions they built and the opportunity they created for someone like him to thrive.
For years now, Brookhiser has helped bring the Founders back to life, precisely Lincoln’s purpose as the president contemplated for his country a new birth of freedom, “the old freedom” they envisioned in 1776 but couldn’t quite perfect.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-465-03294-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014
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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