A candid, moving, and entertaining memoir by the US senator from Arizona and potential presidential candidate. Aided by Salter, his legislative assistant since 1989, McCain writes of growing up with his sister and brother as navy “brats,— constantly moving from school to school as their devoted mother filled in the educational cracks at home. The boy was strongly influenced by his father and grandfather, both four-star admirals and war heroes, honest, brave, and loyal men with reassuringly normal human imperfections. An individualist to the core and self-described hell-raiser, McCain chafed under the severe discipline of the US Naval Academy, constantly challenging petty rules he considered unnecessary in the making of an officer. He graduated near the bottom of his class despite being outstanding in history and literature. Flying off the carrier Oriskany in the Vietnam War, he shared the poor regard fellow pilots had for the civilian managers of the war (“complete idiots” in his judgment), who refused to allow airmen to bomb Russian SAM missile sites that were causing heavy US pilot and plane losses. Shot down and captured near Hanoi, McCain suffered more than five years of beatings and torture. Feisty as ever, the POW made it worse for himself by resisting his captors as much as he could, holding onto the steely resolve of his role models, —the faith of his fathers.— He still regrets his single breakdown under severe pain, but McCain has managed to prevent bad memories of war from destroying his present well-being; he feels that Vietnam matured him, strengthened his confidence, and forced him to honestly look at his failures—in youth as well as wartime—while seeing opportunities for redemption. Impressive and inspiring, the story of a man touched and molded by fire who loved and served his country in a time of great trouble, suffering, and challenge. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-375-50191-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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