A pleasing mixture of high-seas adventure and shrewd analysis.
An illuminating look at an underappreciated chapter of the Revolutionary War: the daring, faintly disreputable, privateer war on British maritime interests.
As Robert Morris, financier to the American Revolution, remarked of the British, “They have much more property to lose than we have.” Accordingly, and following wartime conventions of the era, the Continental Congress commissioned citizen sailors to attack British shipping. For their towering self-interest and for the drain they took on scarce resources necessary to the Continental Navy, John Paul Jones detested them. For carrying the war to the British, Washington, Franklin and John Adams, from a polite remove, cheered them on. For the staggering potential profit, the nation’s leading financiers, Philadelphia’s Morris, the notorious Browns of Providence and an entirely new generation of entrepreneurs and speculators rushed to fund them. Patton (Life Between Wars, 1997, etc.) tells marvelous sea stories about privateers Jeremiah O’Brien, John Manley, James Mugford, Gustavus Conyngham and about the Royal Navy, charged with the impossible task of patrolling a 1,000 miles of coastline with only 50 warships to protect against the depredations of these “legal” pirates. Though the privateers had much to gain, if captured they were denied all rights typically accorded prisoners of war and held under the terms of Parliament’s controversial “Pirate Act of 1777,” untried and without the possibility of exchange in wretched prison ships. Patton also subtly examines the curious interplay between patriotic purpose and economic gain, and the always uneasy marriage between public service and private speculation. Through his sensitive treatment of Morris and the Browns—and especially of Silas Deane, the colonies’ agent in France—and of Nathanael Greene, Washington’s favorite general, the author demonstrates how, from the beginning, rampant capitalism compromised the virtue of the infant republic and how privateering specifically accustomed the country to a variety of enduring, sometimes dubious, financial practices.
A pleasing mixture of high-seas adventure and shrewd analysis.Pub Date: May 20, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-375-42284-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2008
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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