Politics junkies will find this rewarding, particularly in Alter’s account of the inner workings of the White House and...
Newsweek senior editor Alter (The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope, 2006, etc.) turns in a freshman-year report card for the sitting president, with mixed but generally good grades.
Obama is acing civics, to be sure, but he’s having difficulty with some of the schoolyard bullies. A case in point, and one that occupies much of the author’s account, is the battle for health-care reform. The book closes before the recent congressional squeaker passing bills in the House and Senate, but the lesson remains the same. The president took terrific pains to involve the Republicans in the enterprise, and the Republicans responded by kicking sand in his face. At countless points during its life, health-care reform seemed dead in the water, but it was helped at the last moment by an incredibly callous move on the part of a California Blue Cross enterprise, which “announced a 39 percent rate hike in the middle of the debate.” Re-energized, Obama spent much of March 2010 mustering his forces and applying pressure so he could get the reform package passed—putting his presidency, Alter notes, as well as the future of the Democratic Party, in jeopardy. Looking into the president’s past, the author portrays Obama as a fighter who sometimes gives the impression that he would rather be doing something else, a peacemaker who isn’t afraid to pressure friends and enemies alike to achieve the larger good, but also as a man who thinks things through well in advance. One of the newsworthy moments comes early in the narrative, with Obama recruiting Hillary Clinton for his Cabinet even as the primaries were still in heated contention. Alter is admiring but not uncritical, rejecting the too-much/too-soon view of some commentators while noting a few missteps.
Politics junkies will find this rewarding, particularly in Alter’s account of the inner workings of the White House and Capitol Hill.Pub Date: May 18, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4391-0119-3
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2010
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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