A distinguished historian’s fascinating WASP roots narrative that excels as family saga, revisionist American history, and inquiry into what we can possibly know about the past. In addition to sharing a family tree with the US President James K., famed journalist George, Wilson era diplomat Frank, and WWII General James, the author’s relatives have taken bows on every stage of American history, and can be traced all the way back to the 15th-century lowland Scotsman John Maxwell de Pollok, whose holdings included a small pond (—pollok— in Gaelic) south of Glasgow. Instead of wallowing in his ancestors’ triumphs, Polk (History/University of Chicago; Passing Brave, 1973, etc.) considers the sparse, misleading, and frequently apocryphal evidence that remains, and then works such evidence into the larger American scene. When documentation fails to disclose much about the 17th-century immigration of Protestant Scottish mercenary Robert Pollock to Lord Baltimore’s Catholic New World land grant colony on the Chesapeake Bay, Polk goes for the fun facts, offering miniature monographs on Indian relations (which were very good, at first), the inadequacies of the Scottish axe, the curious lack of dinner forks, and the grim hardships attending a failed tobacco plantation that—now a wildlife refuge—justly earned the sobriquet Polk’s Folly. We hear of inglorious Indian trader relatives, and nasty colonists who nearly doomed Washington’s Continental Army (with which Polk family members wintered at Valley Forge) with bad provisions, desertions, and betrayals to the British. Gathering momentum in discussing the 19th-century perils of James, a Union calvary officer imprisoned during the Civil War who later gunned down one of Judge Roy Bean’s corrupt cohorts, the chronicle soars into the 20th century with gripping accounts of the notorious Zimmerman telegram and Patton’s tank battles, concluding with the murder of journalist James. Brilliant historical narrative that celebrates, in family members and the nation as a whole, an abundance of heroism, tragedy, guts, and glory.
Pub Date: Jan. 18, 2000
ISBN: 0-385-49150-6
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1999
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 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.
