Brookhiser might have done more to examine the text with an eye to that question, but this remains a balanced and thoroughly...
Third in National Review senior editor Brookhiser’s series on the heroes of the American Revolution (Founding Father, 1996; Alexander Hamilton, American, 1999).
Gouverneur Morris was less celebrated in his own day than either Hamilton or Washington, but not for want of trying: he had an endlessly high regard for himself, chased women on two continents, led a life of wealth and influence before and after the Revolution (the seat of his family estate stretched from the Harlem River to Long Island Sound, and as a lawyer he commonly earned fees of $10,000 a pop), and was altogether satisfied with his abilities and accomplishments. The scion of French Huguenot and Dutch forebears, Morris enjoyed an aristocratic heritage that “represented something that existed nowhere else in the Thirteen Colonies [but New York]—an old world of European settlement that preceded the arrival of Englishmen.” For all that, Morris was quick to choose the Continental side when the war came, and unwavering in his devotion to the American cause. Although his leanings were fundamentally conservative, Morris championed religious freedom, disagreeing with fellow Federalist John Jay that “Americans were a united people . . . professing one religion”—which, Brookhiser points out, meant not Christianity but Protestantism—and holding vigorously that “matters of conscience and faith, whether political or religious, are as much out of the province, as they are beyond the ken of human legislatures.” Brookhiser also asserts, intriguingly, that Morris mistrusted democracy and favored national over states’ rights—and that he foresaw the Civil War as early as 1812, when he urged New York and New England to break away from the slaveholding states. As the lead author of the Constitution, Morris had ample opportunity to insert his views on such matters.
Brookhiser might have done more to examine the text with an eye to that question, but this remains a balanced and thoroughly interesting study of the man and his time all the same.Pub Date: June 3, 2003
ISBN: 0-7432-2379-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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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