In this unusual study of Benjamin Franklin's personal relationships, Middlekauff (History/Univ. of Calif., Berkeley; The Mathers, 1971, etc.) points out that the beloved American sage and statesman had enemies who hated him and whom he hated in return. Carl Van Doren called Franklin a ``harmonious human multitude.'' In contrast to this popular image, Middlekauff depicts Franklin as a man of profoundly contradictory qualities who was often anything but ``harmonious.'' For instance, Franklin loathed the autocratic proprietor of the Pennsylvania colony, Thomas Penn, for attempting to stanch democracy in the colony and for failure to defend the Pennsylvania frontier from Indian attacks. For his part, Middlekauff writes, Penn hated Franklin, recognizing in him a man of ability who sought to take the colony away from the Penn family. Also, despite years of admiring the British Empire, Franklin came to detest England and all of its institutions in light of the crisis that led to the American Revolution and the cruelty of the British war effort. The war also cost him his close relationship with his son William, the royal governor of New Jersey at the war's outset and a prominent Tory throughout. And as Middlekauff points out, even on the patriot side there were those who disliked and distrusted him: Arthur Lee, Ralph Izard, and John Adams, other American diplomats in Paris when Franklin was forging the key strategic relationship with France, resented Franklin's brilliant success with the French, his acceptance of the relaxed morality of French court life, and his expertise in the game of European diplomacy. For all this, Middlekauff's study does not really disturb the popular image of Franklin; in most of the cases he recounts, Franklin had reason to dislike his adversaries. And despite this, as the author points out, Franklin generally regarded his enemies ``with some serenity, much as he might have regarded wayward children.'' An original contribution to the extensive literature on Franklin.
Pub Date: April 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-520-20268-6
Page Count: 275
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
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