Although there are a few good points to pick out of this discussion, its subject might have been better served by a more...
A biography that sheds light on Maj. Gen. Arthur St. Clair (1734?–1818), a little-known Founding Father of the United States.
Although St. Clair fought in the American Revolution, served as president of the Continental Congress, was governor of the Northwest Territory, and gave much of his fortune to the American cause, he died in poverty and is little noted today. With this debut account, Phillips hopes to “tell the real story of this unrecognized American patriot.” Part One covers St. Clair’s Scottish heritage, including his connections with Freemasonry. Part Two follows him to the American colonies, where he served as a British officer, married in 1760, and retired from the British army two years later. He settled in Ligonier Valley, Pennsylvania, where he became a prominent landowner. In 1775, he accepted a commission in the Continental Army. Part Three covers the Revolutionary War, during which St. Clair participated in the Quebec invasion, helped organize militia, and took part in Gen. George Washington’s crossing of the Delaware River. His effort to defend Fort Ticonderoga against a larger British force ended in retreat. In Part Four, set after the war, St. Clair became governor of the Northwest Territory for 15 years; after a disastrous campaign against Native Americans in 1791, his reputation never recovered. Part Five considers his ultimate legacy. Phillips does amplify St. Clair’s contributions and shows how he was likely scapegoated for failures that were not of his making; for example, he points out that poor supplies, rather than poor leadership, helped to doom the aforementioned Native American campaign. But the book’s chronology is hard to follow, with chapters circling backward and forward to repeat events, information, and various points. Also, Phillips makes editorializing judgments (“This duty-bound patriot, St. Clair, had the courage to make decisions that needed making”) and relies on dubious sources, as when he offers Rhode Island’s Newport Tower as evidence of a 1398 Scottish visit to America, when it’s actually the remains of a mid-17th-century windmill. Notes, a bibliography, and an index are included.
Although there are a few good points to pick out of this discussion, its subject might have been better served by a more scholarly approach.Pub Date: Aug. 29, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4917-3782-8
Page Count: 328
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
