Remnick’s fluent writing makes this expansive, significant book move along swiftly. Readers will look forward to the sequel,...
From New Yorker editor Remnick (Reporting: Writings from The New Yorker, 2006, etc.), a world-ranging, eye-opening, comprehensive life to date of the 44th President of the United States
World-ranging because, writes the author, “Barack Obama’s family, broadly defined, is vast. It’s multi-confessional, multiracial, multi-lingual, and multi-continental.” One of his half brothers, born in Africa, lives in China; a cousin is a rabbi; other cousins are blond children of the prairie. Then there is his father, a promising economist with a drinking problem, and his mother, an anthropologist who left the young man with her parents in order to pursue her career. Obama, as Remnick’s allusive title suggests, has served as a bridge among cultures and races, though his steadfast wish to be seen as a person of accomplishments who happens to be black does not neatly fit the pigeonholing that so many of his critics wish to entertain—notwithstanding Obama’s evident delight at resisting categories. He makes another bridge, too, as Remnick cogently writes—a bridge to the past and to the bridges Dr. King crossed at Selma, Montgomery and Washington; a bridge, as a memoirist, to the rich history of African-American narrative. The author also delves into Obama’s travels in Pakistan with a Muslim friend and his relationship with the firebrand preacher Jeremiah Wright, all of which fed into “the story of race in the [2008] campaign.” Yet for all the potential political derailments his past and friendships might have caused, the author depicts Obama as a survivor, an adept practical politician and, most importantly, a leader who demands to be taken seriously.
Remnick’s fluent writing makes this expansive, significant book move along swiftly. Readers will look forward to the sequel, eight years from now.Pub Date: April 6, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-4360-6
Page Count: 672
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2010
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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