A crisply told tale fleshing out one of American history’s more intriguing footnotes.
For 10 days, this unlikely spy was “among the most wanted fugitives in the history of the United States.”
The son of prosperous Connecticut parents, John Cook tried his hand at law, clerking and sales before attaching himself, more out of romance than principle, to the abolitionist movement. He fought under the notorious militia of Capt. John Brown in Bloody Kansas. In 1858, Brown dispatched Cook to Harper’s Ferry to gather information crucial to the plan to seize the federal arsenal, liberate slaves and take slave owners hostage. Following his capture after the failed raid and throughout the course of his trial, Cook’s betrayal of the locals (he fathered a child and married during his time in town) earned him an enmity exceeding even that felt toward Brown. When it became clear that he would repudiate Brown and name the old man’s “aiders or abettors” to save himself, Cook lost any support he might have received from Northern sympathizers. In this first full biography of any of Brown’s followers, Lubet (Law/Northwestern Univ.; Fugitive Justice: Runaways, Rescuers, and Slavery on Trial, 2010, etc.) is especially effective at capturing the courtroom drama surrounding Brown, Cook and their captured confederates. With sharp portraits of the lawyers, clear explanations of their various machinations and evocative descriptions of the legal proceedings, he brings to life the charges of treason and murder, the pleas for mercy and the poignancy of Cook’s pathetic confessions, insufficient for the prosecution, too little for the purposes of his defense, too shameless for Cook to maintain dignity, too detailed for Brown’s idolaters to bear. At age 30, the reckless Cook was hanged, mourned only by his wife and still-loving sisters.
A crisply told tale fleshing out one of American history’s more intriguing footnotes.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-300-18049-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 24, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2012
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
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