A lively account of Clara Barton's life during the Civil War that reveals both the character of this compelling woman and the awfulness of war. Oates (Abraham Lincoln, 1984; Let The Trumpet Sound, 1982) quotes liberally from her voluminous correspondence, much of it apparently written with an eye toward publication. Beginning his story with the opening days of the war, when Barton was working in the U.S. Patent Office in Washington, D.C., Oates gives a vivid portrait of life in the wartime capital. Within months, Clara, as he always refers to her, became a one-woman relief agency, collecting clothing, food, whiskey, and medical supplies from women in her home state of Massachusetts and distributing them to soldiers. She persuaded officials to let her take her supplies onto the battlefield at Antietam, becoming the only Northern female nurse to serve under enemy fire. Later she served at the battles at Fredericksburg and Battery Wagner, and when the fighting ended, she aided in the search for missing soldiers, a task that took her to the notorious Andersonville prison. Oates makes much of her brief fling with a married man, Colonel John Elwell, even providing details of mid-19th-century contraceptive methods, although there is no evidence that Barton or her lover used them. He claims that this is the story Barton wanted told. Maybe, maybe not. Her bravery under fire, her drive and endurance, her sense of duty and propriety, her ability to rouse public support for her relief efforts, and her skill at manipulating the military and political bureaucracies are all shown here, but so are her depressions, her inability to work within existing nursing and relief services, and her outrage when other women infringed on her territory. Splendidly detailed narrative with special appeal for Civil War buffs and lovers of history—and herstory. Includes maps—not seen.
Pub Date: April 21, 1994
ISBN: 0-02-923405-0
Page Count: 450
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2025 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.
