A thoroughly readable, scrupulously fair assessment of the one president who could inspire a Mt. Rushmore makeover.
Prolific historian Brands (History/Univ. of Texas; The Money Men: Capitalism, Democracy, and the Hundred Years’ War Over the American Dollar, 2006, etc.) turns his well-honed biographer’s eye to FDR.
Although the progressive administrations of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson had chipped away at the excesses of capitalism, no peacetime executive in American history attempted to wield power as fully as FDR. Upon taking office in 1932 and facing a worldwide economic depression, he pledged to ask Congress “for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis—broad executive power…as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.” Brands focuses on Roosevelt’s bold, persistent, not always successful New Deal experimentation to save capitalism from itself and to preserve democracy. Born into every conceivable advantage, FDR—particularly after his midlife polio affliction—became the unlikely tribune of the common man, earning the scorn of those wary of veiled socialism and, later, as war loomed, those fearful of dangerous international entanglements. Brands considers Roosevelt’s career (which roughly mimicked his cousin Theodore’s) at every stage—state senator, assistant secretary of the Navy, vice presidential candidate, governor—but devotes most of the narrative to his unprecedented four-term presidency. By the time it ended, Roosevelt had so transformed the office and the country that not even his fiercest critics dared attempt to roll back the change. The author explains the birth of that era and how the vast expansion of the federal government and executive power was attributable to the imagination, discipline, drive and, to the great frustration of his enemies, popularity of the 20th century’s most consequential president. Even though Brands’s evenhanded treatment—he’s forthright about FDR’s inveterate duplicity, his overreaching and his gobbling up of the personal and professional lives of those closest to him—fails to add much new information, his book will likely be the go-to popular biography for quite some time.
A thoroughly readable, scrupulously fair assessment of the one president who could inspire a Mt. Rushmore makeover.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 1008
ISBN: 978-0-385-51958-8
Page Count: 752
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2008
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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