An absorbing look at the first American presidency, in which Washington emerges not as the familiar George Stuart icon but as a fallible human being—one whose personal qualities nonetheless made him the quintessentially great man of American history. In focusing on the prosaic facts of Washington's presidency rather than on his better-known, and more heroic, Revolutionary War career, Smith (The Harvard Century, 1986, etc.) shows that the first President was not only the admirably self-sacrificing Cincinnatus of legend but a politically judicious statesman as well. The challenges facing the new President in 1790 (when Smith begins his account) were enormous: The young country lacked military power and political traditions, and it was financially impoverished, riven by ideological and sectional rancor (epitomized by the enmity between Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson and Secretary of the Treasure Alexander Hamilton), and beset by hostile European powers and Indian tribes. Under these circumstances, Washington had to invent the Presidency, restore the nation's credit, and give the republic a measure of respect at home and abroad—all while avoiding involvement in Europe's turbulent politics. Although the first President, aided by vigorous and brilliant associates like Jefferson and Hamilton, succeeded in achieving these goals, his true greatness, Smith shows, lay in his resistance to the insidious enticements of power: ``By voluntarily relinquishing office at the end of two terms, Washington forced a world more accustomed to Caesar than Cincinnatus to revise its definition of greatness.'' Washington emerges here as vain, often humorless, and painfully reserved, but Smith demonstrates that this leader's qualities of wisdom and self-restraint helped give the new nation an enduring tradition of democratic government. A fine, highly readable, and nicely balanced account.
Pub Date: Feb. 15, 1993
ISBN: 0-395-52442-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1992
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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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