Well written and sensible—especially when Widmer notes that “it’s antidemocratic to expect all of our leaders to be great.”...
Pity poor Martin Van Buren: reviled in life, ignored in death, undistinguished enough that biographers have had a hard time finding much to say about him. Until now.
Clinton administration advisor Widmer (Young America, 1999) reckons that Van Buren will always be considered one of our lesser leaders: “His presidency [1837–41] produced no lasting monument of social legislation, sustained several disastrous reversals, and ended with ignominious defeat after one short term.” Van Buren is unknown today, Widmer adds, mostly because no one is looking for him, a lost figure in the years between the War of 1812 and the Civil War. He was well known in his day, however, and even though always something of an outsider, the first of the non-Anglo presidents, a native speaker of Dutch and of humble origins, Van Buren forged a new Democratic Party made up of southern planters, New York financiers, and New England industrialists alike. Such a broad constituency, however, forced the president into many compromises: Though he didn’t quite oppose slavery, for instance, he quietly supported certain civil rights for African-Americans. (Too quietly, it appears: In 1839, he issued an executive order demanding the return of rebellious slaves to their Spanish owners, an act making him a villain in Steven Spielberg’s film Amistad.) As a result, both northern abolitionists and southern slaveholders came to mistrust Van Buren, who, Widmer insists, had other virtues: He refused to invade Texas, championed the cause of the urban poor, and advanced ideas that would cause historian Frederick Jackson Turner to consider him an architect of progressivism. Yet Van Buren also presided over the ruinous Panic of 1837, and he failed to push through his pet reform—to create an independent treasury. Though crafty and diligent, in the end not even the seasoned politician dubbed the “The Fox” could weather all the storms that sank his administration.
Well written and sensible—especially when Widmer notes that “it’s antidemocratic to expect all of our leaders to be great.” Q.E.D.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2005
ISBN: 0-8050-6922-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 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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