An entertaining, enlightening look at an administration that was never dull.
An oral biography of the Barack Obama administration, culled from interviews conducted between May 2016 and October 2017.
Abrams (Die Hard: An Oral History, 2016, etc.) takes snippets from his interviews with all the players in this real-life drama, from the election through the end of the administration. The flowing narrative includes revealing insights from a wide variety of both Democratic and Republican politicians, speechwriters, attorneys, and others, from David Axelrod to the West Wing receptionist. Readers experience the first campaign and the many attendant doubts, starting with the uncertainty about whether Obama could even win the nomination. Success meant the team had to go into overdrive, and that’s what they did, taking on an economic collapse, the fraught stimulus bill, stabilizing the Middle East cease-fire, and a promise from Republicans that they would never compromise and would fight the Democrats on everything. Luckily, Obama had a great team working with him, most of whom would do anything he asked of them. That was a trait that held throughout the administration, as people who were burned out by life in Washington, D.C., took on even more assignments just because the president asked them. The author effectively shows the incredible patience exhibited by the president and the invaluable help proffered by Vice President Joe Biden, whose 30 years of experience in Washington provided that extra push when it was required (often). Unfortunately, Republicans were sworn to a policy of obstructionism and manipulation of the legislative process, and the frustrations of the president and his staff are abundantly clear throughout the narrative. At the beginning of the book, Abrams lists the “participants” and their titles; in the appendix, the author provides a complete listing of all of the staff members during Obama’s terms in office. Though technically “unauthorized,” Abrams put in the work with his dozens of interviews, and he also “received cooperation from the Obama White House, the Obama Foundation, and the postpresidency Office of Barack and Michelle Obama.”
An entertaining, enlightening look at an administration that was never dull.Pub Date: July 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5039-5166-2
Page Count: 500
Publisher: Little A
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
PROFILES
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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