A fine, objective portrait in paradox, shrewdly detailing how Jefferson Davis's character flaws rendered him woefully unsuited to be President of the Confederacy. The author (no relation to his subject) brings to bear the military acumen one might expect from a former editor of Civil War Times Illustrated and author of more than 25 books on the Civil War and southern history, including Duel Between the First Ironclads and The Battle of New Market (both 1975). Yet his discussion of strategy is also informed by a firm grasp of Davis's extremes of character. It seemed logical in 1861 that the South would turn to Davis. He was, after all, its major military hero (as a colonel in the Mexican War, he helped win the Battle of Buena Vista); the natural successor to John Calhoun as the Senate's chief States'- rights advocate; and, under President Franklin Pierce, one of the most innovative secretaries of war ever. Yet, as early as his two courts-martial while a West Point cadet and army lieutenant, Davis manifested negative traits that proved fatal as a chief executive: anger, pedantry, vanity, indecision, and, as his future second wife noted after their very first meeting, an overbearing ``way of taking for granted that everybody agrees with him.'' He had the diligence and intelligence of a bureaucrat, but none of the interpersonal skills of a politician. Author Davis examines how these strengths and weaknesses affected the Confederate leader's relationships with his strong-willed second wife, Varina, and his mentor, brother Joseph; his unusually benevolent treatment of slaves; and his mismanagement of the western theater of operations, aggravated by petty squabbling with Generals Pierre Beauregard and Joseph Johnstone and foolish loyalty to incompetents like Braxton Bragg and Leonidas Polk. A dispassionate, well-researched, and skillful biography of a complex and controversial figure. (Sixteen pages of b&w illustrations—not seen.)
Pub Date: Dec. 4, 1991
ISBN: 0-06-016706-8
Page Count: 792
Publisher: HarperCollins
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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