Knott and Williams expertly show how Hamilton was often attacked because Washington was untouchable.
An elegant dual study resurrects Alexander Hamilton as one of George Washington’s most valued advisers.
Though it is difficult to add any new information to the history of the framers’ relationships to each other, Knott (National Security Affairs/United States Naval War Coll.; Rush to Judgment: George W. Bush, the War on Terror, and His Critics, 2012, etc.) and Williams (The Jamestown Experiment: The Remarkable Story of the Enterprising Colony and the Unexpected Results that Shaped America, 2011, etc.), the professional development director at the Bill of Rights Institute, attribute the ratification of the Constitution, among other key events, to the professional, enduring friendship between these two key players. Of vastly different backgrounds and ages, Washington and Hamilton were nonetheless ambitious men of the Enlightenment who cared deeply about honor at all cost. Both men’s personalities and careers were defined by war; as Washington’s aide de camp, Hamilton distinguished himself for his bravery under fire. Although the two were somewhat estranged immediately after the war, they both came to the conclusion during the Continental Congress that “the common good necessitated a stronger national government instead of a government controlled by the narrow, self-interested states.” Re-energized by their shared vision, they both threw their weight behind ratification—Washington by his sheer dignity and authority, Hamilton through his Federalist Papers. Indeed, Hamilton’s insistence that Washington become the first president, as well as his essays on the office itself, would allow Washington to embody that “indispensable” role. Although not Washington’s first cabinet choice for secretary of the Treasury, Hamilton would masterly define the role through his creation of a national bank, among other accomplishments. The authors move chronologically, carefully sifting the evidence of Hamilton’s indispensability to the president and his loyalty in the face of increasing partisanship by Thomas Jefferson’s Republicans. Washington repeatedly called on Hamilton’s advice—e.g., regarding the Jay Treaty—and enlisted him to assist with the crafting of his farewell address.
Knott and Williams expertly show how Hamilton was often attacked because Washington was untouchable.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4926-0983-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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