Plenty of long, definitive works exist, but Brinkley takes his job seriously, filling 160 pages with a thoughtful,...
The admirable American Presidents series nears its end with another slim but astute biography by another big-league historian, this time Brinkley (The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century, 2010, etc.).
The reputations of his predecessor (Eisenhower) and successor (Lyndon Johnson) are rising steadily; not so with John F. Kennedy (1917-1963), whose middle-of-the-pack rating has changed little. This seems a fair evaluation of his actual accomplishments, admits Brinkley, who adds that he left an enormous legacy as a charismatic leader and a glamorous symbol of hope and purpose long after his death. He was the handsome, unscholarly, self-indulgent son of Joseph Kennedy, whose enormous wealth and ambition cleared his path through Massachusetts and then national politics. As a congressman and senator, Kennedy may have been more conservative than Eisenhower—more fiercely anti-Soviet, in favor of military spending, uninterested in domestic reform and civil rights and an admirer of Joseph McCarthy. Elected our youngest president in 1960 by a tiny margin, his charm enchanted the nation despite a first year that included the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion and bungled Vienna summit. Experience and input from advisors, including his brother, Robert Kennedy, improved his performance and social conscience, but Congress rejected his bills advancing civil rights, tax reform, aid to education, medical care for the elderly and antipoverty efforts. All passed under Lyndon Johnson, who possessed political skills that Kennedy lacked.
Plenty of long, definitive works exist, but Brinkley takes his job seriously, filling 160 pages with a thoughtful, opinionated biography.Pub Date: May 8, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-8050-8349-1
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: March 25, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2012
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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