Despite countless books about Lincoln and those in his orbit, Chase is an important figure who merits this capable study.
In a follow-up to Seward: Lincoln’s Indispensable Man and Stanton: Lincoln’s War Secretary, Stahr turns his attention to the president’s treasury secretary.
Salmon P. Chase (1808-1873) was also the sixth chief justice of the Supreme Court and a major player in pushing for Black emancipation and voting rights, and he created the first national bank system and paper currency at a time of deep conflict and crisis during the Civil War. Born in New Hampshire, Chase cut his teeth in Ohio law and politics, where he evolved from an ambitious dilettante regarding slavery to a ferocious defender of fugitive slaves and Black voting rights. His parents died young, leaving behind 10 children and “substantial debt,” and Chase went to live with one of his uncles, an Episcopalian bishop who founded Kenyon College. Like many Chases before him, he graduated from Dartmouth College and studied law until he passed the bar in 1829. In Stahr’s overlong yet sturdy narrative, Chase emerges a driven young man determined to make his mark. He headed a vigorous law practice in Cincinnati and served in the Senate and as the governor of Ohio. As the nation began to break apart along pro- and anti-slavery lines, Chase embraced the Whig Party but found ultimately that it could not incorporate the anti-slavery movement. He advocated first for the Liberty Party, then became an important founder of the Republican Party, on whose ticket Lincoln ran for president. While Chase was brought up multiple times as a presidential candidate, he was best suited as ally, and Lincoln relied on him, despite the rival status, as treasury secretary during the Civil War and then as chief justice. During his tenure as justice, he supported the first Black man to the bar and dissented strongly in a case that prohibited a woman from practicing law. He also presided over the Andrew Johnson impeachment, a key moment in this well-researched account.
Despite countless books about Lincoln and those in his orbit, Chase is an important figure who merits this capable study.Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5011-9923-3
Page Count: 832
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2021
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
