A worthy overview that acknowledges Wilson’s considerable strengths and his many limitations.
Latest in the American Presidents series, profiling a respected but now overlooked chief executive.
“Woodrow Wilson lived too long and then died too soon,” writes Brands (History/Texas A&M; The Strange Death of American Liberalism, 2001, etc.). Born before the Civil War, Wilson lived into the mid-1920s, long enough to see the emasculation of his pet project, the League of Nations. By this account, Wilson was an accidental politician, roped into running for New Jersey office after he lost a long battle as president of Princeton over where to locate the new graduate school. Elected by a commanding margin after wowing listeners with his fine oratory, Wilson earned good marks as governor, though his handlers weren’t pleased when he demolished former patron Boss Smith’s political machine. He was recruited to run as a Democratic candidate for president in the 1912 election, the first, Brands writes, “in which party primaries played an important role.” Lifting a page from Theodore Roosevelt, Wilson pledged not just to rein in the trusts but to destroy them, a sentiment that played well to Progressive audiences. But Brands suggests that Wilson was not particularly popular once in office, especially after he went back on his pledge to keep America neutral in WWI. Neither was he an effective lawmaker, perhaps because he was severely depressed following his wife’s death in 1914. When Wilson suffered a massive stroke in 1919, second wife Edith and confidantes in the White House “conspired to shield the public from full knowledge of the president’s disability.” Brands argues that Wilson might have been better served had he died as a result of that stroke, “a martyr to the cause of world peace,” rather than living to see that cause jeopardized by the Versailles Treaty and the economic ruin it wreaked on Germany, opened the way for WWII.
A worthy overview that acknowledges Wilson’s considerable strengths and his many limitations.Pub Date: June 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-8050-6955-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2003
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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