The book will be judged, fairly or unfairly, by what comes next. If Clapper’s revelations undermine the support of an...
As the nation’s top spymaster, former Director of National Intelligence Clapper vowed never to publish a memoir. Then he became enraged at Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign on behalf of Donald Trump, and he changed his mind about writing a book.
A few weeks before Trump’s surprise victory, Clapper and Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson issued a public warning about Russian dirty tricks meant to influence American voters. The author felt dismay when the vast majority of Americans apparently paid no attention to the warning. In the introduction, Clapper states unambiguously that following the election, “the CIA and the FBI continued to uncover evidence of preelection Russian propaganda, all intended to undermine [Hillary] Clinton and promote Trump, and the Intelligence Community continued to find indications of Russian cyber operations to interfere with the election.” The author then devotes the next 300 pages to the trajectory of his career, during which he served Republican and Democratic presidents from positions inside and outside the military. From 2010 to 2017, Clapper served as President Barack Obama’s nonpartisan senior intelligence adviser. As the author’s chronicle of his spy management unfolds chronologically, he offers insights into U.S. relations with North and South Korea, Iran, Iraq, Somalia, Syria, Ukraine, and, of course, Russia, with an emphasis on Vladimir Putin’s determination to damage the U.S. in any way short of nuclear warfare. In the final quarter of the text, Clapper demonstrates his increasing exasperation with the current president’s lies, inability to deal rationally with other nations, utter lack of respect for worthy diplomats and politicians, and, especially, his cozying up to Putin.
The book will be judged, fairly or unfairly, by what comes next. If Clapper’s revelations undermine the support of an irrational Trump among voters, he will consider the book a success, however limited. However, if the book fails to contribute to the halting of Trump’s widespread corruption, Clapper makes clear he will do whatever he can from his retirement to protect what is left of American democracy.Pub Date: May 22, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-55864-4
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 6, 2018
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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