History that remains solidly relevant today, and a real eye-opener for anyone who thinks that fierce debates over tax...
A biography of populist politician William Jennings Bryan that demonstrates that progressive evangelicalism is nothing new.
Kazin (History/Georgetown; The Populist Persuasion, 1995, etc.) summarizes in just one chapter Bryan’s first 30 years: birth in 1860, Illinois childhood, study of law, marriage to Mary Elizabeth Baird. The biographer’s real interest lies in Bryan’s public career, jumping quickly into Bryan’s move to Nebraska and subsequent terms in Congress, beginning in 1890. The author argues that his subject was the first politician to envision a government that, through its expansive powers, could do great things for ordinary people. (Well, some ordinary people: Bryan’s concern extended only to white folks.) His populism sprang from his Christianity, and if his “progressive interpretation of the Gospels” never got him elected to the White House (he ran for president three times), it did earn him the enthusiastic devotion of tens of thousands of Americans. A gifted orator, Bryan frequently lectured on tariffs and the gold standard. Later, he took up the causes of anti-imperialism, prohibition and women’s suffrage; as Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of State, he was a strong advocate of peace. Americans today, however, remember him mostly as the diehard opponent of evolution depicted in the popular play Inherit The Wind. Kazin revisits the well-known scene from the 1925 Scopes trial, in which Bryan, lawyer for the prosecution, actually took the stand as a witness and wilted under Clarence Darrow’s sharp-tongued questions about biblical literalism. (Bryan died six days later.) But Kazin also usefully contextualizes Bryan’s hostility toward the theory of evolution: In addition to believing that it “opened the door wide to immoral behavior,” he worried about the slippery slope from Darwinism to eugenics.
History that remains solidly relevant today, and a real eye-opener for anyone who thinks that fierce debates over tax reform, corporate power, imperialism and evolution are recent developments in American politics and culture.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2006
ISBN: 0-375-41135-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2006
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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