A perceptive, gritty portrayal of the frenzy of war and a father and son caught at its tumultuous center.
A gripping history of a family torn apart by political upheaval.
In this fresh contribution to the abundant biographies of Benjamin Franklin and histories of the American Revolution, poet, playwright, and biographer Epstein (The Ballad of Bob Dylan, 2011, etc.) focuses on the relationship between Franklin and his illegitimate son, William, who rose to become a political force in his own right. Epstein’s title refers both to William’s sorely tested loyalty to his father and unwavering loyalty to England as the Colonies erupted in rebellion and violence. Drawing on much unpublished correspondence as well as published works, the author constructs a fast-paced, vivid narrative with a host of characters whose appearance and personality he etches with deft concision. According to a close family friend, Franklin had been the loving, “intimate, and easy companion” of his son when William was a young man. Charming, “handsome, easy-going, more agreeable” than his father, William achieved success that eventually rankled Benjamin. Epstein notes “open, unabashed competition” by the time William was 40 and governor of New Jersey. However, it was not competition that caused their deep rift but rather their immersion in vastly different political worlds: William, in the Colonies, sought to “manage the volatile emotions” of rebellious protesters; Benjamin, in England, saw Parliament as “power-hungry, factious,” and corrupt and urged his countrymen “to stand firm, trusting in their own sense of justice,” even risking “a permanent break from the mother country.” Epstein is sympathetic to William’s desperate desire to quell dissent, actions that led to a year’s imprisonment in a squalid cell while his father basked in the warmth of celebrity in Paris, where he lived a luxurious life in a villa. What did Benjamin know, asks the author, about “that hell on earth,” the “war of desolation, the hangings and rapes and dismemberments,” the 10,000 refugees? Father and son eventually reconciled, but Franklin never really forgave William for what he considered betrayal.
A perceptive, gritty portrayal of the frenzy of war and a father and son caught at its tumultuous center.Pub Date: June 6, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-345-54421-6
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
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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