Any understanding of the history of social reform in America begins with Woolman, and understanding Woolman begins here.
A masterful biography of the Quaker prophet and path-breaking social reformer.
Woolman (1720–72) remains the earliest and most complete American embodiment of the notion of a “social conscience.” In Mount Holly, N.J., he shed a succession of jobs (most notably as a shopkeeper, tailor, schoolteacher and legal functionary) to devote more time to ministering for the Society of Friends, carrying his message throughout the colonies and, by the end of his life, even to England. He was a pacifist and a tax resister, and he preached a doctrine of peace with the Indians, care for the impoverished, kindness to animals and devotion to simplicity. Remembered today primarily for his pioneering anti-slavery stance, Woolman sought in the gentlest possible fashion to convert others to the truth he believed came directly from God. Closely tracking Woolman’s spiritual autobiography, The Journal of John Woolman—remarkably still in print since its 1774 publication—and relying on Woolman’s essays and pamphlets, Slaughter (History/Univ. of Notre Dame; Exploring Lewis and Clark: Reflections on Men and Wilderness, 2003, etc.) beautifully explicates the spiritual growth of this secular saint. The author also applies a thorough knowledge of the period’s philosophical, theological and historical currents to explain a man whose deep religiosity and exquisite sensitivities prevented him from riding a horse (an unnecessary burden to the animal), wearing dyed clothing (a product, even at some remove, of slave labor) or drafting a will that conveyed a slave. So much saintliness might be hard to endure if not for Slaughter’s keen awareness of his subject’s eccentricities and shortcomings: For example, Woolman regularly abandoned his wife and child for his wide-ranging and frequently dangerous itinerant ministry; he deemed harmless sleight of hand and juggling to be “frivolous toying with the universe”; he opposed inoculations against small pox. Nevertheless, by the end of this detailed, well-written consideration of Woolman and his enduring significance, the reader can’t help but share Slaughter’s admiration for his hero’s sincerity, courage, persistence and humility.
Any understanding of the history of social reform in America begins with Woolman, and understanding Woolman begins here.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8090-9514-8
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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