New York Times reporter Frantz (From the Ground Up, 1991, etc.) and congressional staffer McKean trace the triumphant and ultimately tragic career of one of the architects of the American Century. In his 1991 memoir, Counsel to the President, distinguished Washington lawyer and Democratic Party insider Clark Clifford, for decades the epitome of prestige and probity in Beltway legal and political circles, recounted the many successes of his brilliant career as counsel, confidant, and cabinet member in the Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations. Even as his autobiography was being published, however, a public scandal, which would lead to a criminal indictment and the loss of a law firm that he had spent his life building, was tarnishing Clifford's carefully built reputation. As the authors relate, Clifford and law partner Robert Altman represented erroneously (if, as Altman proved to a New York jury, innocently) to federal regulators that the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) did not have a relationship with First American Bankshares, of which Clifford had become chairman in 1982. In fact, BCCI, a mystery-shrouded, Luxembourg- based entity later linked to laundering drug money, was intimately involved with both First American and with Clifford and Altman, who accepted large loans from BCCI principles. Although Clifford was legally exonerated of any wrongdoing, his role as the ultimate Washington wise man was finished forever. Acknowledging Clifford's years of excellent service to his country and essential public-spiritedness, the authors argue that he was partly a victim of changing political mores. But what he was truly guilty of was self-deception, first in persuading himself that he could occupy his sphere of influence indefinitely and, finally, in convincing himself that he was innocent of, at the very least, gross negligence in the BCCI affair. Clifford emerges in the authors' well-told account as an American tragic hero, with all his Greek counterpart's fatal flaws.
Pub Date: Aug. 21, 1995
ISBN: 0-316-29162-5
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1995
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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