A warmly human portrait of an unlikely president.
A man unprepared for the presidency faces dire challenges.
On April 12, 1945, when Franklin Roosevelt suddenly died, Harry Truman (1884-1972) ascended to the presidency. By his own estimation, he was the wrong man at the wrong time. “I’m not big enough for this job,” he remarked to a Vermont senator soon after being sworn in. Many in the U.S. echoed his concern: “The gravest question mark in every American heart is about Truman,” a senator from Michigan wrote. “Can he swing the job?” Drawing on letters, memoirs, and published sources, journalist Baime (The Arsenal of Democracy: FDR, Detroit, and an Epic Quest to Arm an America at War, 2014), a regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal and other publications, offers a fast-paced, well-detailed chronology of Truman’s transformation from an official with little administrative responsibility into a politically astute and ultimately beloved leader. After giving a standard overview of Truman’s biography in the first third of the book, the author follows the new president’s day-to-day—and sometimes hour-by-hour—schedule as he confronted the challenges of a nation embroiled in war. Just weeks after he took office, Germany surrendered. It was Truman’s 61st birthday, and although he felt relieved, he knew, as he announced to the press, “our victory is but half-won.” The Allies still faced “the treacherous tyranny of the Japanese,” and Truman received conflicting advice about how to surmount that threat. Just days before Germany fell, he had learned, for the first time, about the development of the atomic bomb, a weapon that he believed could force Japan’s unconditional surrender. As weeks turned into months, his colleagues “singled out a curious trait about Truman”: his firm decisiveness. “You could go into Truman’s office with a question and come out with a decision more swiftly than any man I have ever known,” his Soviet ambassador said. As Baime shows, that decisiveness came into play at his meeting with Churchill and Stalin at Potsdam and in his go-ahead to obliterate Hiroshima.
A warmly human portrait of an unlikely president.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-544-61734-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
SEEN & HEARD
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