A detailed account of McCarthy and of the CPUSA marred by ideological blinders. For true believers only.
A revisionist biography of Joseph McCarthy and the red-baiting movement he spawned.
Most Americans look upon McCarthyism as part of one of the darkest and most shameful periods in the country’s history, one in which past associations, flimsy as they may have been, were drudged up and examined in the public square to foment hysteria and advance a craven politician’s career. But not Evans (The Theme Is Freedom, 1994, etc.), who views McCarthy as the misunderstood Cassandra, the lone truth-teller with the courage and insight to expose the vast red conspiracy that supposedly infiltrated the highest levels of government. The McCarthy portrayed here was ultimately undone by slicker, more media-savvy politicians with a vested interest in keeping quiet the Stalinists in our midst who were plotting the overthrow of the American government. The book is exhaustively researched and impeccably sourced, as it traces the rise of the Communist Party from the 1930s onward and identifies the lives and careers of fellow travelers as they worked their way up through the State Department. Though overlong, it is also well-written and accessible. But it’s highly unlikely that Evans will win any converts. McCarthy wasn’t a victim but a craven brute who played fast and loose with the facts, someone perfectly willing to destroy lives and reputations for political gain. A clear-eyed account of the Communist Party in midcentury would be most welcome, but would need to include an honest appraisal of the man properly regarded as its chief villain, rather than the Commie-under-your-bed conspiracy Evans lays out here.
A detailed account of McCarthy and of the CPUSA marred by ideological blinders. For true believers only.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4000-8105-9
Page Count: 672
Publisher: Crown Forum
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2007
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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