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BIG FELLOW, LONG FELLOW

Name: BIG FELLOW, LONG FELLOW
Author: T. Ryle Dwyer
ISBN: 0-312-21919-9

A JOINT BIOGRAPHY OF COLLINS AND DE VALERA

by T. Ryle Dwyer ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 15, 1999

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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

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)