Intriguing, but the author lacks the tact needed to sway the masses.
Conservative economist DiLorenzo (How Capitalism Saved America, 2004) continues his diatribe about the causes of the Civil War that he began in The Real Lincoln (not reviewed).
Indeed, the author repeats many of the arguments made in his previous book, published in 2002. His contention that Abraham Lincoln was a white supremacist whose primary motivation for fighting the Civil War was a desire to maintain a system of tariffs that greatly benefited northern states has enough evidence behind it to at least be compelling. But his unrelenting vitriol toward an American icon, perhaps the foremost American icon, will undoubtedly rankle many and may position him as a publicity-hungry academic peddling controversy. DiLorenzo (Economics/Loyola Coll.) contends that a “Lincoln cult” seeks to perpetuate his image as a near-perfect president for the purpose of promoting big government, weakening states’ rights and justifying the controversial actions of later chief executives. As an example, the author points to neo-conservative Michelle Malkin’s In Defense of Internment (2004), which tried to rationalize FDR’s treatment of Japanese-Americans during WWII, an act that mirrored Lincoln’s imprisonment of northerners who protested his use of force to keep the South in the Union. Historians from the left and the right are members of the Lincoln cult, DiLorenzo states, seeking to use some facet of his legacy to bolster their own agendas. The author’s arguments that the South had a legal right to secede and the Founding Fathers themselves would have supported that choice are convincing, as is his assertion that the war erupted from economic issues, not slavery. However, his unceasing attacks on Lincoln put readers on the defensive, and when he obsessively hounds a single Lincoln scholar throughout an entire chapter, he seems to be pursuing an academic vendetta rather than any greater understanding.
Intriguing, but the author lacks the tact needed to sway the masses.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-33841-X
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Crown Forum
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2006
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
SEEN & HEARD
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