A touch too reserved and polite, given the circumstances, and in need of supplementing by hard-edged books like Jonathan...
Gracious, sometimes-wonkish post-mortem of the last presidential election by its surprise loser, who still can’t quite believe…well, what happened.
“I ran for President because I thought I’d be good at the job,” writes Clinton (Hard Choices, 2014, etc.), modestly. She adds, a touch less demurely, “I thought that of all the people who might run, I had the most relevant experience, meaningful accomplishments, and ambitious but achievable proposals, as well as the temperament to get things done in Washington.” Against her was arrayed a field of Republican candidates that included the one no one took seriously—but also, as the author notes in a reckoning that is remarkably measured, a whole cultural and political field of opponents, including Russian hackers and a grudge-bearing Vladimir Putin, the crew of WikiLeaks, Bernie Sanders and his devout followers, misogyny, and a few missteps that, refreshingly, Clinton’s not shy about owning up to. (One takeaway: don’t campaign with pneumonia. Take a day off.) Of the many enemies, writes the author, misogyny was likely the most intractable, even given James Comey, the screams about emails, voter suppression, and Donald Trump’s hammering away about “lying Hillary,” to say nothing about looming behind her creepily in debate. Mostly, Clinton campaigned against anger, and she could never quite get a handle on how to reckon with it. Pundits have since insisted that Clinton should have spoken more from the heart and been less managed, which isn’t really how politics is done—well, until Trump came along and opened the door to a post-truth America. Of all the upshots, that truth business seems to be what bothers Clinton most, but mostly she’s understandably amazed, as are so many, to have gone to bed in one America and awoken in another: “I picture future historians scratching their heads, trying to understand what happened. I’m still scratching mine, too.”
A touch too reserved and polite, given the circumstances, and in need of supplementing by hard-edged books like Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes’ Shattered. Still, a useful book to read—and, for many, to mourn over.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-7556-5
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2017
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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