A riveting account of the bluegrass bluebloods who embodied Lincoln’s prewar notion of a “house divided” more than he ever...
A compelling collective biography of the Kentucky in-laws of Abraham Lincoln.
Berry (History/Univ. of Georgia; All That Makes a Man: Love and Ambition in the Civil War South, 2003, etc.) brings to vibrant life Lexington aristocrats never before studied in depth by Lincoln biographers—all the more remarkable given that before the war, the rising politico was closer to them than to his own family, and that in the conflict their divisions caused him no end of heartbreak and scandal. Mary Todd Lincoln and her 13 siblings symbolized the war’s divisive toll on families—six sided with the Union, eight with the Confederacy. Four either became casualties themselves or had husbands who were—most notably Lincoln. With swift strokes, Berry sketches the broad characteristics of the clan (intelligence, quick tempers, alcoholism, litigiousness, ambition), as well as the individual traits that led them to nearly every major event and theater of the conflict. The children or their spouses included a Confederate brigadier general killed at Chickamauga; a Richmond prison commandant accused of mistreating Union soldiers; a talented rebel surgeon also charged with prison abuse; a brother-in-law who tried to blackmail Lincoln so he could retain an appointive Illinois post; and another sister who not only showed up in Mississippi at Jefferson Davis’s inauguration as Confederate president but likely committed treason. Berry is especially shrewd in analyzing the Lincolns’s marriage, showing how Abraham’s pity for Mary’s blind rages often fed her desire to punish him for this feeling. Berry also sensitively examines how the president’s anguish over his in-laws led him to transform the shopworn metaphor of family into transcendent rhetoric that united the nation in a new “House of Abraham” built on freedom and forgiveness.
A riveting account of the bluegrass bluebloods who embodied Lincoln’s prewar notion of a “house divided” more than he ever expected.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-618-42005-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2007
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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