An eye-opening look at the personal politics behind the present administration.
A revealing biography of the man the sitting president calls “Fredo,” and who once insisted, “My job is to make sure we don’t make the same mistakes made by previous administrations.”
George W. Bush has long relied for legal counsel on fellow Texan Alberto Gonzales. Picked from a pool of candidates by Harriet Miers, Gonzales was, writes Austin-based journalist Minutaglio, every bit the token minority member, someone to point to as a Republican born without a silver spoon; what is more, as a partner in a major Houston firm, Gonzales took a substantial pay cut to go into government. Known more as a workhorse than a brilliant legal mind—though, brilliantly, he long managed to hush up Bush’s drunk-driving conviction and other indelicacies—Gonzales has been one of the loyal if undistinguished soldiers the president is said to favor; he has backed Bush up on his spree of executions of retarded prisoners in Texas and written policies that defend and even authorize the torture of suspected al-Qaeda members, though his most concentrated project on becoming White House counsel was to put together a “heavily detailed, multiappendix, 160-page-guide” detailing the condition of Clinton staffers’ offices when the Bush team moved in, festooned with signs reading “VP’s cardiac unit” and with posters of a faked Time magazine cover bearing the headline, “We’re Fucked.” “We think it unlikely that a reader would attribute the message in question to members of the incoming Administration,” he noted for the benefit of the General Accounting Office, the recipient of the report. Gonzales is apparently not well-liked inside the Beltway, shunned by hardcore conservatives as much as civil libertarians and particularly by military officers saddled with carrying out his tribunals, but he has not yet suffered the fate, metaphorical or real, of his Godfather nickname-sake. Bush apparently adores him, and indeed he may still be in the running for a Supreme Court seat.
An eye-opening look at the personal politics behind the present administration.Pub Date: July 3, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-111920-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Rayo/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2006
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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