Former New York City mayor—columnist—mystery novelist—radio pundit Koch reflects on life at 75, in a book whose meandering nature provides an apt chassis for Koch’s vigorous social views and uniquely optimistic/hectoring outlook. With good humor and mock shock at his longevity and continued public presence, Koch begins by enumerating the many employment venues he’s sampled in his determination to stay productive and relevant: movie critic, SlimFast spokesman, People’s Court judge. Although he’s disingenuous about being called the quintessential New Yorker, Koch embodies his city’s signal qualities, both good (his calls for racial and economic justice) and bad (his unapologetic self-importance). And while Koch’s opinions are usually strident, they are often compelling, as in his scorching attack on the widely accepted business practice of —downsizing— older workers, left to fend for themselves after decades of service. Such diatribes support Koch’s central point: the need to approach human aging shrewdly, in practical terms (money management, retirement savings, health insurance) as well as on the more essential spiritual level of keeping active and engaged with the world. His tone remains tart, but his topics are surprisingly varied: All manner of anecdotes, including graphic notes on his personal health, are followed by keen musings on subjects ranging from the racial disparities of American justice to the problematic state of live theater. And just when you think his opinions on public figures are predictably blunt (as when he savages Rudy Giuliani on civil-liberties grounds), he—ll surprise you with his humanistic consideration of a figure like Al Sharpton. If His Honor seems at times a brash (and now wizened) cartoon character who never spotted a fight or a digression he didn—t like, his latest missive should delight both senior readers, for whom Koch’s admittedly fortunate circumstances may still be instructive, and students of his classic New York attitude. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-688-17075-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1999
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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