Told with a sure voice and in clear delight of the period, Davis draws a sharp picture not merely of Toombs and Stephens,...
A crisp story capturing the important roles played by Georgia natives Toombs and Stephens in the birth of the Confederacy, from prolific historian Davis (Bluegrass Confederate, 1999, etc.).
“When it came to the breakup of the Union and the formation of a new nation, no two men together exerted as much influence on the creation and framing of the new government,” as did Toombs and Stephens, suggests Davis in this biography of the friendship of the men that concentrates its energy on the Confederate years. Toombs was the hothead, full of boasts and bluster, a powerhouse who scorned compromise and never scorned a tip of the bottle; Stephens hardly threw a shadow, but he knew how to maneuver politically, kept a cool hand, and exercised a subtle intellect. Davis molds a shapely story here, moving briskly through their early years and clarifying each man’s role in the secession before he gets to what is the meat of the matter: the crafting of the provisional, then permanent constitutions, and a depiction of how secession came to embody the notion of slavery as a “normal and natural condition” (as opposed to the view that looked upon the breakup of the Union being an act in defense of state sovereignty). Thereafter, once they had gotten “the concern” started, their political influence waned and both men went into opposition. Stephens might have become Vice President, but President Davis shared few of his ideas and had little use for him. Toombs took a commission and proved to be a loose cannon on the military field—although, at a distance, colorful in the extreme. Davis has a particular knack for recreating battle scenes, and they shine in these pages as he depicts Toombs’s regiment under fire.
Told with a sure voice and in clear delight of the period, Davis draws a sharp picture not merely of Toombs and Stephens, but of all the politicking of the Antebellum and Civil War South.Pub Date: April 24, 2001
ISBN: 0-7006-1088-X
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Univ. Press of Kansas
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2001
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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