Little remains blank in this thorough life, of great interest to students of Western history.
A comprehensive, lively study of one of America’s greatest—and most controversial—explorers.
John Frémont scaled mountains, coined the geographical term “Great Basin,” and battled renegades and rebels while traversing and mapping the American West. For his troubles, he was accused at various points of lying about the places he’d been, of inventing adventures in the interest of self-promotion, and of committing various crimes, from fomenting revolt to dining on his dead companions. His political rivals, who were legion, also never failed to mention that he was the illegitimate son of a French homewrecker. Frémont himself didn’t help matters much, writes Chaffin (History/Emory Univ.): he was arrogant, to be sure, and so loose with the accounting in his role as a would-be mining and railroad magnate as to verge on fraud. He also had a profound talent for picking “formidable enemies, including General Stephen Watts Kearny, the philosopher Josiah Royce, and Frank Blair of Washington’s powerful Blair family”—to say nothing of Abraham Lincoln, who removed Frémont from Civil War command and effectively ruined his postwar career. (He also had a good eye for choosing allies, however, among them the powerful politicians Thomas Hart Benton and Joel Poinsett.) Chaffin takes pains to show what in Frémont’s record was of his own making, and what was laid at his door by enemies. He recognizes Frémont’s many accomplishments as an explorer and geographer whose work advanced the cause of American empire—not only by helping thwart the ambitions of Mexico in California and of Britain in the Northwest, but, more simply, by providing accurate charts for those who followed (“Frémont’s 1843 map [of the interior West]—eschewing anecdotes, legends, and other half-truths repeated from past maps—included only areas that he had personally seen and surveyed. Areas uncrossed by the expedition remained blank”).
Little remains blank in this thorough life, of great interest to students of Western history.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-8090-7557-1
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2002
Bernstein and Woodward, the two Washington Post journalists who broke the Big Story, tell how they did it by old fashioned seat-of-the-pants reporting — in other words, lots of intuition and a thick stack of phone numbers. They've saved a few scoops for the occasion, the biggest being the name of their early inside source, the "sacrificial lamb" H**h Sl**n. But Washingtonians who talked will be most surprised by the admission that their rumored contacts in the FBI and elsewhere never existed; many who were telephoned for "confirmation" were revealing more than they realized. The real drama, and there's plenty of it, lies in the private-eye tactics employed by Bernstein and Woodward (they refer to themselves in the third person, strictly on a last name basis). The centerpiece of their own covert operation was an unnamed high government source they call Deep Throat, with whom Woodward arranged secret meetings by positioning the potted palm on his balcony and through codes scribbled in his morning newspaper. Woodward's wee hours meetings with Deep Throat in an underground parking garage are sheer cinema: we can just see Robert Redford (it has to be Robert Redford) watching warily for muggers and stubbing out endless cigarettes while Deep Throat spills the inside dope about the plumbers. Then too, they amass enough seamy detail to fascinate even the most avid Watergate wallower — what a drunken and abusive Mitchell threatened to do to Post publisher Katherine Graham's tit, and more on the Segretti connection — including the activities of a USC campus political group known as the Ratfuckers whose former members served as a recruiting pool for the Nixon White House. As the scandal goes public and out of their hands Bernstein and Woodward seem as stunned as the rest of us at where their search for the "head ratfucker" has led. You have to agree with what their City Editor Barry Sussman realized way back in the beginning — "We've never had a story like this. Just never."
Pub Date: June 18, 1974
ISBN: 0671894412
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1974
SEEN & HEARD
An eclectic assortment of women make for an entertaining read.
An exuberant celebration of more than 100 women who shaped the myths and realities of New York City.
In her debut book, journalist Scelfo, who has written for the New York Times and Newsweek, aims to counter histories of New York that focus only on “male political leaders and male activists and male cultural tastemakers.” As the author discovered and shows, the contributions of women have been deeply significant, and she has chosen a copious roster of personalities, gathered under three dozen rubrics, such as “The Caretakers” (pioneering physicians Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell and Dr. Sara Josephine Baker, who enacted revolutionary hygienic measures in early-20th-century tenements); “The Loudmouths” (Joan Rivers and Better Midler); and “Wall Street” (brokerage firm founder Victoria Woodhull and miserly investor Hetty Green). With a plethora of women to choose from, Scelfo aimed for representation from musical theater, law enforcement, education, social justice movements, and various professions and organizations. Some of the women are familiar (Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis for her preservation work; Brooke Astor for her philanthropy), some iconic (Emma Lazarus, in a category of her own as “The Beacon”), and some little-known (artist Hildreth Meière, whose art deco designs can be seen on the south facade of Radio City Music Hall). One odd category is “The Crooks,” which includes several forgettable women who contributed to the city’s “cons and crimes.” The author’s brief, breezy bios reveal quirky facts about each woman, a form better suited to “The In-Crowd” (restaurateur Elaine Kaufman, hardly a crowd), entertainers (Betty Comden, Ethel Waters), and “The Wisecrackers” (Nora Ephron, Tina Fey) than to Susan Sontag, Edith Wharton, and Joan Didion. Nevertheless, the book is lively and fun, with something, no doubt, to pique anyone’s interest. Heald’s blithe illustrations add to the lighthearted mood.
An eclectic assortment of women make for an entertaining read.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-58005-653-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Seal Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
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