A delightfully convincing case that Washington was history’s least ruthless and most successful revolutionary.
A provocative biography arguing that George Washington’s greatest accomplishment was guiding a rare revolution that turned out well for the revolutionaries.
Veteran historian O’Connell (Fierce Patriot: The Tangled Lives of William Tecumseh Sherman, 2014, etc.) reminds readers that most subsequent revolutions featured mass murder and ended in tyranny. In the first half of the book, the author travels familiar ground but does it with insight and wit. An unapologetic patrician, Washington yearned to scale Virginia’s aristocracy and Britain’s military. He succeeded in the first, becoming a leading figure in the French and Indian War and marrying Virginia’s richest widow. His failure, despite aggressive lobbying, to receive a royal commission was Britain’s first great mistake. A member of Virginia’s House of Burgesses, he dutifully supported opposition to Britain’s clumsy attempts to tax the colonists. By the time fighting broke out in 1775, everyone knew that Washington wanted to lead the army because he arrived at the Continental Congress in full dress uniform. Modern historians snicker, but it resonated with contemporaries, already impressed by his dignity, modesty, and reputation. He was the unanimous choice. O’Connell points out that Britain had long been crushing rebellions in Ireland and Scotland and saw no reason to change tactics in America. Even discounting patriot propaganda, looting and rape were common, prisoners were treated badly, and commanders known for cruelty were mostly British. Scholars wonder at his deference to the ineffectual Continental Congress. As generalissimo with a loyal cadre, he could have taken charge at any time but never did and expressed outrage when others suggested it. “He fervently believed in his own high-mindedness and was determined to conduct himself accordingly,” writes the author. “Nothing compromises morality like a long, violent revolution, and George Washington…remained a bulwark of decency, a remarkable achievement and possibly his greatest contribution to the Glorious Cause.”
A delightfully convincing case that Washington was history’s least ruthless and most successful revolutionary.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9699-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
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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