You don’t need to be black or a minority to grasp the need to stand up and fight in today’s political world. The authors lay...
The fascinating story of four women who got into politics in the 1960s and ’70s and are now the rare Washington insiders who understand people from all areas of the nation.
The authors—Brazile (Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House, 2017), a Democratic political strategist and TV commentator; Caraway, a public relations executive and Democratic strategist; Daughtry, a preacher, organizer, and CEO of the 2008 and 2016 Democratic National Conventions; and Moore, a former assistant to Bill Clinton—all came from different parts of the country but had in common strong family upbringings and a devotion to civil rights. The list of their mentors is an all-star cast: Ron Brown, Oprah Winfrey, Maria Shriver, Vernon Jordan, and the Rev. Willie Barrow. Each author remembers vividly the first time she met Jesse Jackson; Brazile worked on his first presidential campaign. Caraway has held key leadership roles in nearly every major presidential campaign of the past couple decades. Daughtry was CEO of the DNC, twice. Moore served in Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition and became director of political affairs at the White House. They shared their lives as true friends, weathering setbacks, disagreements, and breaks but always trusting each other. Their individual strengths increase significantly when they’re together, as they were during the 2004 election. Washington power brokers regularly host informal dinners for presidential hopefuls, and the authors decided to do the same. The rules were simple: The candidate would come alone, be responsible for the bill, and everything was off the record. The dinners would include the candidate, the four women, and some of their associates—though the meals with Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were jam-packed. The authors’ description of the professionalism and political savvy exhibited and/or lacking at those meals is eye-opening.
You don’t need to be black or a minority to grasp the need to stand up and fight in today’s political world. The authors lay it out well in this solid primer on how to “dare to enter the halls of power.”Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-13771-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 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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