An illuminating companion to Walter Isaacson’s Benjamin Franklin (2003) and other recent studies that cast the Founder in a...
A reluctant revolutionary? A French wannabe? A portrait of Ben Franklin in a decidedly contrarian—though careful—bit of revisionism.
“Although he may have eventually become the supreme symbol of America,” writes Wood (History/Brown Univ.; The Radicalism of the American Revolution, 1992, etc.), “he was certainly not the most American of the Founders during his lifetime. Indeed, one might more easily describe him as the least American and the most European of the nation’s early leaders.” This was not only because most of Franklin’s commercial and intellectual ties were with London, but also because he inclined, early on, to a somewhat aristocratic view of human affairs, sniffing at those who had to make a mere living and enjoying gentlemanly pursuits. So upper-crust English was he by temperament that Franklin relocated to England in the late 1750s and proceeded to write his American friends letters about the blessings of London for anyone with a brain: the city enjoyed “in every Neighbourhood, more sensible, virtuous and elegant Minds, than we can collect in ranging 100 Leagues of our vast Forests.” Franklin offered to pay the losses caused by the Boston Tea Party out of his own pocket, and he pressed for an English–American Act of Union that would forever bond the two. Yet something happened in England—something about which Wood offers intriguing guesses—so that Franklin returned to America convinced of the justice of the revolutionary cause: “What impressed most delegates” to the Continental Congress, Wood writes, “was the intensity of Franklin’s commitment to the patriot cause. He seemed deeply angry at the Crown and British officialdom and was impatient with all efforts at reconciliation.” He committed himself to that revolution even as other Founders suspected him of being a fair-weather friend, at considerable personal danger. Even so, he moved to Paris almost as soon as the war was over, and “the nearly eight years that Franklin spent in France were the happiest of his life,” far away from the postcolonial crowd.
An illuminating companion to Walter Isaacson’s Benjamin Franklin (2003) and other recent studies that cast the Founder in a new light.Pub Date: May 24, 2004
ISBN: 1-59420-019-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2004
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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