An intimate look at life in tumultuous times.
Americans’ struggle for freedom and independence affected a wide range of individuals.
Aiming to reveal the reality of life in the Colonies and Britain before and during the Revolution, Shorto (Amsterdam: A History of the World’s Most Liberal City, 2013, etc.) focuses on six different people: George Washington; British aristocrat and statesman George Germain, Lord Sackville; Venture Smith, an African-born slave; Abraham Yates, a shoemaker who rose to become mayor of his native Albany, New York; Cornplanter, a Seneca warrior; and Margaret Coghlan, the American-born daughter of a British officer. Except for Washington and Sackville, the protagonists are little known, which affords the author a fresh and often fascinating perspective on 18th-century life. Drawing on memoirs, letters, archival material, and much historical writing, he fashions a brisk chronological narrative that jumps from one individual to another. Smith’s story is especially lively: a tall, strapping young man, he quickly learned “how to leverage his position” even though he was enslaved and managed to buy freedom for himself—and eventually for his wife and children. Settling in Stonington, Connecticut, he amassed considerable property, so much that when his former owner fell into bankruptcy, Smith offered him a mortgage on 100-plus acres of land, and, in the transaction, managed to provide an inheritance for his own son. Yates emerges as a complicated character: working for popular representation, nevertheless he was “convinced that government, any government, was a thing to be mistrusted,” growing ever more powerful, “always at the expense of individuals.” He was opposed to ratifying the Constitution because it gave the federal government “vast powers” and therefore was pleasantly surprised at the creation of the Bill of Rights, which ensured individual freedoms. Coghlan seems the most arbitrary—and unrepresentative—of Shorto’s choices: young, intelligent, and well bred, she was beautiful enough to attract many indulgent lovers in America and abroad, where she ended her life in penury. If Coghlan “felt the pull of freedom,” still Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Gloria Steinem hardly seem to be her “ideological descendants.”
An intimate look at life in tumultuous times.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-393-24554-7
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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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