After Mayor, Politics, and All the Best—three works that would surely have worn out the ``I'' key on an old-fashioned typewriter—what more has New York's cantankerous former mayor to say? Well, while earlier books have rehashed political battles, this one, Koch says, deals with personal moments. How's he doin'? Not bad at winning sympathy at first, with accounts of his pinched family and their exploitation by a richer uncle, of his gruesome war memories and his mother's death from cancer. But once out of law school and into the world, the story seems to confirm the suspicion that Koch never had a personal life. The author revisits familiar political territory—his early reform politics in Greenwich Village; his years on the City Council and in Congress and three terms as mayor; the numerous political campaigns—with emphasis on interpersonal frictions and attention to his ``feelings'': ``I was miserable in Washington''; ``I was incensed.'' The book's refrain might be ``For that I will never forgive him [or her]''; and, like Koch's other books, it's full of catty comments (``Liz [Taylor] looked like a huge horse''), word- for-word replays of petty confrontations, and rancorous complaints of what Koch claims are blacks' special privileges and demagogic leaders. And though Koch boasts repeatedly of his candor, there is no real soul-searching here. He confesses to being deeply depressed by the corruption scandals during his last term, even to entertaining ideas of suicide (``I was in absolute unrelenting agony'')—but not to any mistakes in judgment or to having tolerated patronage arrangements. Today, with ``nine jobs'' (mostly as a media personality), ``I've never been happier''—though Koch can't say the same for his cherished city: ``Mayor Dinkins is doing such a poor job.'' Testy as ever, with some juicy dish and a few good spite stories you can cheer. (Sixteen-page photo insert—not seen.)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-312-08161-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1992
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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