A wisely chosen, expertly arranged collection.
One of the world’s foremost Lincoln scholars offers a selection of the president’s writings and remarks on war, its conduct, trials, horror and meaning.
From his inauguration to his assassination, Lincoln fulfilled the role of commander in chief so skillfully as to become a model for succeeding presidents—reason enough, Holzer (Lincoln and New York, 2009, etc.) argues, to understand clearly the Lincoln record. For this project’s purposes, the author divides the president’s career into three parts: the young Lincoln, a period that included his brief, volunteer captaincy during the Black Hawk War and his stint as a dovish Congressman opposed to the Mexican War; the presidency from 1861 to ’62, during which Lincoln struggled to master warfare’s tools and tactics, to govern his military and civilian subordinates and to shape public opinion; and the war’s final years, when the slaughter only increased before Lincoln’s will and wisdom finally prevailed. From speeches and letters (sent and unsent), grand declarations, official messages and proclamations, orders, telegrams and instructions, hasty memoranda, informal notes and revealing private comments, Holzer assembles the president’s thinking on war, prefacing each selection with helpful remarks providing necessary context. Some of these documents are famous—e.g., the Gettysburg Address—while others are obscure. Some contain deathless rhetoric since memorized by all Americans, while some are merely homespun words (e.g., his battle advice to U.S. Grant: “Hold on with a bulldog gripe [sic] and chew & choke, as much as possible”) that demonstrate simultaneously Lincoln’s untutored prairie origins, his talent for the arresting phrase and his military resolve. All combine to illustrate the Holzer’s thesis that Lincoln, without ever taking the field, waged war with “the most powerful weapon at his disposal: his pen.”
A wisely chosen, expertly arranged collection.Pub Date: April 12, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-56512-378-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Dec. 29, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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