Sometimes rueful, sometimes defiant, always affecting. Even McCain’s political opponents should admire the fiery grace with...
A valediction by the noted senator and presidential candidate.
Teaming up with constant collaborator and staff member Salter, McCain (Thirteen Soldiers: A Personal History of Americans at War, 2014, etc.) looks back on a long career of service to the country. In a narrative bracketed by intimations of mortality—and by one friend in particular, a classmate who “was laid to rest in the Naval Academy’s cemetery on Hospital Point, a beautiful spot overlooking the Severn River”—McCain opens with a gentle dissection of his failed bid for the presidency, which he admits was a great disappointment but an honor all the same. The breaking news from that account is his retrospective wish that he’d gone with his gut and chosen Joe Lieberman as his running mate, sending “an emphatic statement that I intended to govern collaboratively with an emphasis on problem solving not politics, which in 2008 would have been very good politics.” Yet his advisers convinced him to go with the untested Sarah Palin, particularly as a way to send the message that he, not Barack Obama, was the real agent of change. McCain accepts responsibility for the resulting fiasco: “There’s no use bitching about how you were treated in a presidential campaign,” he writes, adding that he got to keep his day job in the Senate, where his friends have numbered Democrats such as Ted Kennedy—who, McCain notes, died of the same brain cancer that he is now battling—and moderate Republicans like Lindsey Graham. He has less use for the likes of Rand Paul, who stayed in the 2008 race longer than he should have in order to make “a point of some kind to his passionate followers,” and Donald Trump. On that note, he writes provocatively of his part in revealing the Steele dossier of the Trump campaign’s involvement with Russia: “Anyone who doesn’t like it can go to hell.”
Sometimes rueful, sometimes defiant, always affecting. Even McCain’s political opponents should admire the fiery grace with which he’s exiting the world.Pub Date: May 22, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-7800-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2018
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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