A few flaws aside, this is an engrossing and informative tribute to a man whom Jimmy Carter rightfully thanked in his...
A memoir of the presidency of Gerald Ford (1913-2006) as seen from the point of view of Ford’s chief of staff and secretary of defense.
When Ford became president on Aug. 9, 1974, writes Rumsfeld (Rumsfeld's Rules: Leadership Lessons in Business, Politics, War, and Life, 2013, etc.), he inherited a nation on “the brink of civil and political collapse.” In his latest book, the author convincingly argues that Ford successfully restored trust in the presidency and held the country together. Born in Omaha, Nebraska, Ford played center for the University of Michigan football team, studied law at Yale, and fought in World War II before his entry into politics. He served almost 25 years as a Michigan congressman before rising to the vice presidency in 1973. With Richard Nixon’s resignation, Ford, who had never run on a national ticket, became president. Although his brief term in office included controversies and missteps such as his pardon of Nixon, the abortive “Whip Inflation Now” campaign, and the appointment of Nelson Rockefeller as vice president, Rumsfeld asserts that Ford oversaw a revival of what had been a moribund economy, responded strongly to the Khmer Rouge’s seizure of the U.S. container ship Mayaguez, and contributed to the birth of the modern human rights movement via his signing of the Helsinki Accords. Above all else, Ford’s honesty, integrity, and decency helped the nation recover from the Watergate crisis. The author also recalls several forgotten chapters of Ford’s presidency, including a Far East trip that featured the first visit of a sitting U.S. president to Japan and a turnout of 2 million people to welcome Ford to Seoul, South Korea. Rumsfeld occasionally confuses dates, and he oversells several of Ford’s accomplishments (the Helsinki Accords being a prime example).
A few flaws aside, this is an engrossing and informative tribute to a man whom Jimmy Carter rightfully thanked in his inaugural address “for all he has done to heal our land.”Pub Date: May 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-7293-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
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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