An uneven but quietly charming, inspiring memoir.
The first woman from Missouri elected as a U.S. senator explores how she fuses traditional notions of femininity with boldness and ambition.
In her first book, McCaskill, with the assistance of journalist Ganey (Innocent Blood, 1990, etc.), recounts how, in the 1950s, female drive and a life outside the home weren't considered “ladylike.” However, her father gave her permission to be bossy and opinionated, and her mother raised her daughters to have independent minds. McCaskill’s career demonstrates how her collegial nature has benefitted her and earned her respect throughout her career. The author’s stories of her early days as a prosecutor and in the Missouri legislature are written to entertain, but they also illustrate the many obstacles she faced early in her career, often against various old-boys' networks in government. She runs down details of seemingly every issue in every one of her campaigns, including her potentially scandalous divorce—which she met head-on with candor and honesty; voters admired her "uncanny ability to deal with adversity.” McCaskill's storytelling style is quick-moving and demonstrates the breadth of her authenticity and commitment to being accountable to her constituents, but the book loses some of its color when she recounts examples of greater senatorial business and what she regards as exasperating "boondoggles" among her colleagues. Her characteristic skill, which would be impressive for senators from either side of the aisle, is her genuine connection with voters: she identifies their core concerns, empathizes and relates to them, and assures them that the government is hearing their voices. It is clear from her life stories that the author has always displayed the ability to make allies out of adversaries—whether in the House or Senate or during her methodical campaign for homecoming queen in high school.
An uneven but quietly charming, inspiring memoir.Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4767-5675-2
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 28, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
