A well-written look at the enigmatic politics and personalities of the early Republic.
For those still pondering the presidential election of 2000, and looking that of 2004 in the eye, comes this knotty tale from the days of the Founders.
“Politicians then, as now, were driven by personal ambition,” writes Revolutionary-era historian Ferling (Setting the World Ablaze, 2000, etc.). “They used the same tactics as today, sometimes taking the high road, but often traveling the low road, which led them to ridicule and even smear their foes, to search for scandal in the behavior of their adversaries, and to play on raw emotions.” In 1800, for instance, Federalists branded Republican candidate Thomas Jefferson “a howling atheist,” while Republicans questioned Federalist candidate John Adams’s war record; so hot did the battle grow that propagandists even turned on their own candidates, as did Alexander Hamilton when, for reasons that are still murky, he published a vicious attack on Adams, “upon whom he heaped all the blame for the erosion of his political fortunes.” Hamilton may have had reason to be ticked off, for the trusted aide of George Washington and Revolutionary War hero found no place on the Federalist ticket, pushed aside in favor of the democracy-loathing Charles Pinckney, of whom “no one ever claimed that his was a charismatic persona.” Jefferson and fellow Republican Aaron Burr (who, Virginia Republicans divined, “was not passionately committed to any political principle”) handily won the electoral race against Jefferson’s one-time friend Adams (they broke, Ferling writes, over a misinterpreted inscription in a copy of The Rights of Man). But Jefferson had also to win in Congress, where the race was much closer. Ferling argues that he did so by brokering a deal with the Federalists, an arrangement that would explain why, “despite having fought against the Hamiltonian system for nearly a decade, Jefferson acquiesced to it once in office” and made other concessions to his political enemies. Whereas in Jefferson’s Second Revolution (see above), Susan Dunn takes a benign view of whatever the arrangement amounted to, Ferling is clearly uncomfortable with the back-room dealing. Otherwise, the two authors complement each other nicely.
A well-written look at the enigmatic politics and personalities of the early Republic.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-19-516771-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004
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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