A book of American history for all, but lawyers and journalists will especially appreciate it.
A Pulitzer Prize–winning historian looks back at the 1730s, when a single court case established the first step toward freedom of the press.
Kluger (The Bitter Waters of Medicine Creek: A Tragic Clash Between White and Native America, 2011, etc.) presents the story of John Peter Zenger (1697-1746). After apprenticing to William Bradford, the appointed royal printer, and serving as his journeyman, Zenger set up his own printing company. It was not as easy as it sounds, and he had considerable backing. This is also the story of the wealthy Lewis Morris. It was the legal engagement required to secure his inheritance that set him on his quest for lifelong learning and power. Eventually becoming one of the strongest politicians in the New York area, he was the senior member of the New Jersey Provincial Council. Kluger also tells the tale of the royally appointed governor serving New York and, after Morris’ successful petition, New Jersey. Historically, governors sent to the Colonies were strong on connections but short on capital. As such, there were many instances of self-serving governors, and Morris’ role in the recall of two of those illustrates how strong his powers were—that is, until William Cosby took over. He immediately took sides against Morris’ faction, siding with the trade barons against him. Here, Zenger met the needs of Morris and his brilliant cohorts. They hired Zenger to publish the New-York Weekly Journal to be an irritant to the governor. Wise to the draconian libel laws, they carefully avoided any illegal steps. Kluger takes some time to get to the meat of the story, but the attempts to indict Zenger and the eventual trial are enlightening and frightening—frightening to see how easily the press could be quashed and enlightening to see how that freedom was secured.
A book of American history for all, but lawyers and journalists will especially appreciate it.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-393-24546-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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