A dry life of a dry man, with a few intriguing glimpses into the Gilded Age.
An unmemorable president earns a fitting biography.
Freelance historian Karabell (Parting the Desert, 2003, etc.) has the unenviable task, in this latest in Arthur Schlesinger’s American presidents series, of chronicling the life and times of Chester Arthur (1829–86), who “belongs to two select, and not altogether proud, clubs: presidents who came to office because of the sudden death of their predecessor, and presidents whose historical reputation is neither great, nor terrible, nor remarkable.” Arthur was indeed a strong supporter of his predecessor, James Garfield, felled by the bullet of a disgruntled jobseeker; although by no means charismatic or even interesting, he was useful to Garfield as an entrée to and liaison with the powerful Republican leadership of New York. Arthur seems to have sought elected public office only reluctantly, and for good reason: as an appointed customs official in New York City, he earned more than $50,000 annually in the 1870s, an astonishing sum of money that owed to an astonishing level of official corruption, though Arthur himself seems to have been honest enough. Though popular precisely because he represented a moderate balance between two competing wings within the GOP, Arthur ran afoul of powerful rivals, including Rutherford B. Hayes, U.S. Grant, and James Blaine, the last of whom essentially forced Arthur out of the White House after he served out Garfield’s term. Arthur’s tenure was not without its accomplishments, Karabell dutifully writes, including a thoroughgoing reform of the civil-service system to professionalize the government and reduce favoritism. On the negative side, Arthur oversaw an immigration exclusion act aimed against the Chinese, which he vetoed at first but then surrendered to; on this and other issues he stepped away from his base of support within his party, and, as Karabell notes, alienating his allies after having “earned the near-permanent distrust of competing factions and of the opposing Democrats.”
A dry life of a dry man, with a few intriguing glimpses into the Gilded Age.Pub Date: June 21, 2004
ISBN: 0-8050-6951-8
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 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
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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