An exhaustively researched, skillfully written joint biography of Michael Collins and Eamon de Valera, whose contrasting legacies shaped the history of 20th-century Ireland. Collins was a brilliant guerrilla leader who deployed selective assassination and deft counterintelligence to cripple Britain’s colonial administration of Ireland. So successful was Collins at rendering Ireland ungovernable that in 1922 British Prime Minister Lloyd George was compelled to seek a negotiated withdrawal. Collins was a realist: His token participation in the failed Easter Rising of 1916 taught him that idealists made the worst wartime leaders. His lifelong contempt for politicians contributed to his eventual break with de Valera. While Collins was mercurial, quick-minded, and gregarious, de Valera was methodical, slow- moving, and introspective. Irish historian Dwyer argues convincingly that the Collins—de Valera split was as much personal as political. Both men were ambitious and often unscrupulous in attaining their goals. De Valera, elected president of Ireland, feared Collins’s popularity and control of the army; Collins considered de Valera an untrustworthy demagogue. When de Valera ordered Collins to negotiate a peace treaty with Britain, a job for which he was particularly ill-suited, Collins suspected a trap. “To me the task is a loathsome one,” said Collins. “If I go, I go in the spirit of a soldier who acts against his judgment at the orders of a superior officer.” When an exhausted Collins returned from London with a peace treaty, de Valera attacked it as pro-British and implied that Collins had betrayed Ireland. Collins defended the treaty as a first step to full independence. The debate over the Anglo-Irish treaty triggered a bloody civil war, during which Collins was killed by anti-treaty forces. De Valera would remain president of Ireland for most of the next 50 years. An essential book for anyone interested in understanding the personal and political dynamics behind the fateful Collins—de Valera rift. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: March 15, 1999
ISBN: 0-312-21919-9
Page Count: 395
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1999
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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