Biographer and financial expert Grant (Mr. Market Miscalculates: The Bubble Years and Beyond, 2008, etc.) takes the measure of “Czar” Reed, the Gilded Age giant of the Congress.
The great John Singer Sargent painted him; the peerless Augustus Saint-Gaudens sculpted him. Both felt obliged to apologize for not quite capturing the essence of Thomas Brackett Reed (1839–1902), the powerful House Speaker. Of the Sargent portrait, the inveterately sardonic Reed remarked: “I hope my enemies are satisfied.” Where artistic geniuses before him have faltered, it seems churlish to censure Grant for failing to give us the man in full, particularly as he writes with great verve about the political issues that dominated Reed’s era. The author effectively demystifies economic arcana—protective tariff, gold standard, bimetallism, etc.—to breezily instruct readers in the intra-Congress, parliamentary maneuvering and mastery of the rules for which the Speaker is best remembered, even to account for Reed’s unlikely late-life apostasy on issues like women’s suffrage and imperialism. Solving the private Reed, though, poses a difficult problem for Grant—indeed, for any biographer looking to pierce the legendary imperiousness that both attracted and repelled colleagues and constituents. Reed’s massive frame, opaque gaze, formidable intellect and lacerating wit kept contemporaries at arm’s length. He was respected, even feared, but never loved. Notwithstanding his fiercely partisan party service, fellow Republicans preferred the likes of the charismatic and thoroughly dishonest James G. Blaine or the amiable, relentlessly ordinary William McKinley for the presidency. Incorruptible in an era notorious for corruption, Reed, nevertheless, was no earnest reformer in the mode of, say, Democrat Grover Cleveland. He was a fatalist about the business cycle and about mankind, and had “no interest in instructing the impure.” He loathed humbug and grandiloquence, severe handicaps for a politician. Asked in 1896 about his chances for the presidential nomination, Reed responded, “They could do worse—and probably will.”
Flawed, yes, but likely to become the standard biography, at least for now.
Pub Date: May 10, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4165-4493-7
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2011
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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