Good social history, weak literary criticism, but the standout here is William Cooper himself, a true American original. (16...
The story of a man's spectacular career in post–Revolutionary War New York and his famous son's novelistic effort to rewrite it.
The ambitious middle son of a poor Pennsylvania Quaker family, William Cooper (1754-1809) married in 1774 and used his in-laws' wealth and status to set himself up as a farmer, land speculator, and shopkeeper. But Cooper's real opportunity came in the 1780s, when he bought up the mortgage to a large tract of land near Otsego Lake on the New York frontier. Using tactics of questionable legality—including buying out Benjamin Franklin's exiled loyalist son, William, without his knowledge—Cooper managed to gain control of the Otsego land and sell it off quickly, simultaneously developing the area and securing his ill-gotten gains. He offered favorable terms to settlers and so earned their trust and loyalty. At the same time, Cooper ingratiated himself with wealthy landowners by managing their land with fantastic success. Cooper became a Federalist political force, and his wealth increased, but his hasty actions often led to disastrous consequences, and in his effort to become a gentleman, he lost touch with the frontiersmen who had made him a success. At his death in 1809—which Taylor (History/Univ. of Calif., Davis) persuasively argues was not the result of a blow to the head by a political opponent, as Cooper's biographers have long claimed—he left a shaky domain, the management of which fell largely on the incapable shoulders of his youngest son, James Fenimore. Unable to save his father's empire in actuality, the novelist sought to reclaim it in The Pioneers(1823), a fictional rendering of his father's fantastic life.
Good social history, weak literary criticism, but the standout here is William Cooper himself, a true American original. (16 pages illustrations, 7 maps, not seen)Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1995
ISBN: 0-394-58054-0
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1995
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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