The underlying point of the book is that Bush/Cheney were right in invading Iraq and waterboarding prisoners. Let the reader...
George W. Bush's vice president speaks—sort of.
Cheney is a company man through and through, a servant of Republican functionaries from the time of LBJ to the recent past—if there is anything to be learned from this bloodless memoir, it is that. The author opens with the outrage of 9/11, in which one thought was foremost on his mind, apart from clearing the sky of planes: namely, “guaranteeing the continuity of a functioning United States government.” In this, he writes, he was the essential element without which that continuity was unsustainable. Cheney’s memoir is political to the extent that he plays the games of hardball politics with everyone he meets, and he makes sure to constantly remind readers of American supremacy and his centrality to it. Colin Powell was his ally until his taste for the war in Iraq weakened, whereupon it was clear to Cheney that Powell had to go. Ditto Condoleezza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld. Cheney’s take on the world is clinical and even scholarly, much like that of Henry Kissinger (another figure whom Cheney does not seem to regard very highly). He is methodical but selective, as when he carefully accounts for his holdings in a certain corporation at the time of his vice presidency: “This was salary that I had already earned, so it was due to me whether the company was doing well or badly.” The company, Halliburton, did well, of course, thanks to no-bid contracts in Iraq—but Cheney still professes irritation that anyone should doubt his clean hands, an irritation expressed by an infamous F-bomb on Capitol Hill (“It was probably not language I should have used on the Senate floor, but it was completely deserved”).
The underlying point of the book is that Bush/Cheney were right in invading Iraq and waterboarding prisoners. Let the reader be the judge—until, that is, history decides on the matter.Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4391-7619-1
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Threshold Editions/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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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