The political and social intrigues of Civil War Washington are given vivid, gossipy immediacy in an unusual treasury of letters from a member of a prominent Union family to her naval officer husband. A true insider, Elizabeth Blair Lee—daughter of Lincoln advisor Francis Preston Blair and sister of both Union general Frank Blair and Postmaster General Montgomery Blair—was privy to the most intimate workings of Union politics. But it is ``Lizzie'' herself, straightforward, opinionated, and insightful, who emerges most forcefully from these 368 journal-like letters to her ``Dear Phil,'' Samuel Phillips Lee, himself a distant cousin to Robert E. Lee. Far from embodying the myth of passive 19th-century womanhood, Lee is revealed as keen observer of the unfolding conflict, with a sparkling irreverence (referring to the disliked President Buchanan as ``Old Buck'' and the proud Jefferson Davis as ``King Jeff'') and a stubbornness that finds her tirelessly agitating to get her husband better ships (``Hot after a steamer for you today''), important postings, and confirmation as an admiral. Living on the edge of battle (``This morning at daylight the morning guns seem very loud to me...it was the Battle at Bull Run—30 miles off''), Lee busies herself with volunteer work and the affectionate education of her young son, offering along the way an unprecedented picture of life in Washington's inner circle. Although lacking the intellectual acuity of Confederate journal-keeper Mary Boykin Chesnut, Lee proves herself more than worthy of serious scholarly treatment. Editor Laas (History/Missouri Southern State College), though, despite obviously careful research, presents her material in unimaginative, almost perfunctory, form, with confusing, repetitive footnotes, and a lack of substantive aids (e.g., a family tree to keep the various Blairs and Lees straight; more frequent historical notes). A valuable academic document, if ill-constructed for a wider audience. (Sixteen pages of illustrations—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-252-01802-8
Page Count: 600
Publisher: Univ. of Illinois
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1991
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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