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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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