Densely researched, swift-moving account full of fighting detail.
Exploration of some of the unsung early war correspondents in New York and London who created the model for vivid prose and humanitarian alarm.
With the installation of a trans-Atlantic telegraph cable connecting America and Europe in 1858, the race for newsgathering took off, while the eruption of the Civil War shifted reader interest from local scandal to “the exclusive battle dispatch that could be issued in an extra edition and hawked on the street at great profit.” Patton (Patriot Pirates: The Privateer War for Freedom and Fortune in the American Revolution, 2008, etc.) captures the gritty, wild-eyed quality of trailblazing early newspapermen like John Russell Young, who made his name covering the Battle of Bull Run, and the Ohioan Januarius MacGahan, along with their exacting editors—only two women are featured: one is MacGahan’s comely Russian wife, the other a wealthy humanitarian widow, Emily Strangford, who met the reporter while setting out to help victims of Turkish-Bulgarian violence in 1876. All the New York newspapers—e.g., James Gordon Bennett’s Herald, Horace Greeley’s Tribune and Henry J. Raymond’s Times—competed with one another for the scoop, learning the value of “creating news instead of waiting to record it”—e.g., the Herald’s sending the rookie reporter Henry Morton Stanley to Central Africa in pursuit of the incommunicado missionary David Livingstone. MacGahan and other American expat correspondents in Paris stumbled on the Franco-Prussian War; he was horrified by the bloody insurrection, taking pains to characterize the violence fairly in his emotional dispatches for the Herald, for which he was highly praised. Another visionary correspondent was the extraordinarily talented artist and writer Frank Millet, who plunged into covering the Russian-Turkish War of 1877 by crisscrossing Central Asia during an era of difficult land travel and illustrating his essays with tremendously moving sketches of the bloodied and wounded. These correspondents became heroes of their time and doubled at times as capable explorers.
Densely researched, swift-moving account full of fighting detail.Pub Date: April 29, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-307-37721-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 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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