Fehrman’s illuminating blend of presidential and publishing history with literary criticism will appeal to amateur...
A lively account of the literary achievements (and failures) of America’s presidents.
Though countless books have been published on nearly every presidential topic imaginable, journalist Fehrman (Home Grown: Cage the Elephant and the Making of a Modern Music Scene, 2013) has found one yet to be covered in-depth: the books that the presidents wrote. While George Washington wasn’t much of a writer, the tradition of the U.S. president’s donning his influential pen started early and has remained strong, with just a handful of exceptions. Nearly every POTUS has written—or had written for him—either a campaign book or a legacy book. The author provides both backstories and modern critiques of well-known books such as The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant and Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father as well as less familiar titles, including Calvin’s Coolidge’s surprisingly well-written autobiography. “As a writer and public speaker,” notes Fehrman, “Coolidge could be funny, imaginative, even rhetorically forceful when it served his ambitions.” Throughout, the author offers highly personal looks at the men who have occupied the White House: “Examining presidents as they write means examining them at their most human.” Consider, for instance, John F. Kennedy, who “craved literary fame” but “lacked the discipline to do literary work.” Beyond just presidential authorship, Ferhman also paints inspiring portraits of how our presidents consumed books, from Grant (“America’s first fiction-loving president”) to Theodore Roosevelt (“Reading, to him, was living”) to Harry Truman, who “read a stunning number of books.” The author goes even further, providing insight on the general history of reading and publishing in America. Overall, the author covers a great deal of ground that even major biographers have skipped over in favor of “sexier” storylines, yet to the book lover, these stories will be unquestionably enticing. Even the footnotes, appendix, and sources offer bookish gems.
Fehrman’s illuminating blend of presidential and publishing history with literary criticism will appeal to amateur historians and bibliophiles alike.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4767-8639-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
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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