A full-dress study of a great general whose life spanned the life of his young nation—from the Founding Fathers to the Civil War—but who has been largely neglected by historians. Johnson (History/Lipscomb Univ.) has delved into vast but scattered primary and secondary sources to write a scholarly biography of Scott, who was one of the first US Army officers to make a formal study of European military manuals, whose regulations established a code that brought new professionalism into 19th-century American warfare. The US Army, under Scott’s innovative leadership, thus became capable of withstanding the best European soldiers. Scott consulted with Lafayette and Prussian officers in Europe, and noted the fatal mistakes—looting and pillage—of Napoleon’s armies in the Spanish and Russian campaigns. Although he blundered early in his career in the Indian Wars in Florida and Alabama, he performed brilliantly in the Mexican War, and his strong discipline and fair dealing with the Mexican civilian population limited guerrilla attacks on his army. He was responsible for the first large-scale construction of amphibious ships in American history, and put them to good use in the successful landing at Vera Cruz. Johnson views Scott’s march from Vera Cruz and his capture of Mexico City in 1847 as the crowning achievements of his career; later, as a diplomat, Scott solved dangerous border disputes with Canada. Johnson shows that Scott never wore humility well: he was an aristocratic conservative forever in conflict with the strong egalitarian forces of his day. Scott’s boldness, knowledge, and ability as a soldier were mixed with conceit, arrogance, impatience, and aggressiveness. Ironically, his overweening ambition and his self-serving nature caused him to fail in politics. The definitive study: Johnson’s distinguished work gives a long-deserved but neglected credit to “Old Fuss and Feathers.— (16 illustrations, not seen) (History Book Club selection)
Pub Date: Nov. 6, 1998
ISBN: 0-7006-0914-8
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Univ. Press of Kansas
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998
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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