Entertaining and informative reading for politics junkies, though not as meaty as Katy Tur’s Unbelievable, reporting on the...
A decade on the campaign trail with Hillary Clinton.
Journalists, especially political journalists, are not supposed to fall in love with their subjects. Chozick, who has covered politics for the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, has a simple explanation: “Usually by the final stretch, candidate reporters are so brainwashed from living in the bubble that we all believe our horse will win even if the facts say otherwise.” The picture did not resolve until Election Day, but the signs were there: Clinton, whom Chozick covered for years and clearly admires, if critically, never quite got the “common person” meme, the one that allowed Donald Trump to “lick his fingers after eating a bucket of greasy KFC on board his 757 and maintain the aura of the workingman” while portraying Clinton as detached and aloof. As the author writes, there was something to that: For many reasons, Clinton disdained the press, especially the Times, and it took great efforts on the parts of her handlers—who here bear sobriquets like Brown Loafers, Policy Guy, Hired Gun, and Outsider Guy—to get Clinton anywhere near a reporter if she could help it. Chozick’s narrative, stretching over Clinton’s two campaigns, is, like the campaigns themselves, a blend of the fraught and the bland: too many buffets and too much alcohol here, breaking news and critical moments there. One sharp-edged portrait of the candidate comes when Bernie Sanders begins to pummel her in the primaries. “Hillary became sullen….She is pouty,” writes the author, “and aggrieved but not surprised that the media hadn’t given her rightful due.” Still, Chozick closes on a note of admiration for her difficult quarry, “the Hillary who tried to hold it all together—her marriage, her daughter, her career, her gender, her country.”
Entertaining and informative reading for politics junkies, though not as meaty as Katy Tur’s Unbelievable, reporting on the other side.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-241359-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 26, 2018
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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