Altogether, a pleasing memoir, with many lessons in practical leadership and public duty.
A business executive and diplomat recalls a long life of service, including recent work, post-9/11, as head of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation.
Whitehead grew up in the Depression, a matter he revisits late in his account, when, as chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank, he warns that the stock market bubble of the mid-1990s “could lead only to one result: a terrible crash.” Headed for a career as a college admissions officer, Whitehead opted for business instead, just when WWII broke out. Trained as a naval accountant, he found himself commanding a landing craft at D-Day. It’s conceivable that memories of the event helped mold Whitehead’s career as a diplomat, though he makes no such stretch here; having earned many fortunes as a financier, he served diligently in the Reagan administration as deputy secretary of state under George Schultz, and, Whitehead relates, he made it a special project to open up Eastern Europe in rather the same spirit as Nixon opened up China to American diplomacy. His insistence that the State Department consider the nations of the Soviet bloc to be “differentiated”—that is, still distinct and individual—was met by considerable resistance on the part of National Security Council hardliners; particularly implacable was an old Wall Street rival, Don Regan, though Nancy Reagan was even more formidable after Whitehead publicly disagreed with the president during the Irangate mess. He scored a victory over the hardliners when, he relates, he convinced Reagan to pay up on belated dues to the United Nations—which he adds, George H.W. Bush undid, bowing once again to the right wing. (Reading between the lines, one might conclude that Whitehead has small regard for any Bush except the unrelated Vannevar.) Whitehead closes by describing the work he has done to rebuild Lower Manhattan, accomplished in part by some very shrewd dealings with residents and businesspeople who are now helping the area flourish anew.
Altogether, a pleasing memoir, with many lessons in practical leadership and public duty.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-465-05054-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2005
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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