More personalities than arms arcana, infused by a deep reverence for his man.
Effectively focused, vividly adept portraits of two newsmakers at the pinnacles of their relevance on the world stage.
Not only was he present at the Reykjavik summit in October 1986, in the role of director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, Adelman (Shakespeare in Charge: The Bard's Guide to Leading and Succeeding on the Business Stage, 1999, etc.) has taught Shakespeare and knows a thing or two about drama, character and leadership. He is convincing in his argument that the Iceland weekend of arms control maneuvering between the two superpower chiefs—Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, who was perched precariously atop the geriatric Soviet dictatorship and desperate to enact reform—had enormous repercussions, namely the beginning of the dismantling of the Soviet state. Indeed, both leaders sorely needed to score a coup during this one-on-one weekend. The gathering was supposed to be low-key, with few advisers, but Gorbachev brought along more than 300 officials and his educated, elegant wife, Raisa. The Soviet leader badly needed to rein in Soviet spending on nuclear armaments to keep up with the West—e.g., countering Reagan’s much vaunted Strategic Defense Initiative—since the Soviet Union, sprawled across satellite minions, was simply broke. Reagan, for his part, emerges in Adelman’s heartfelt yet witty portrait as more in touch than his advisers. However, SDI, or “Star Wars,” proved the sticking point to an agreement between the two mostly willing partners: Gorbachev was terrified of it, Reagan agreed naively to share it, while the truth was that it didn’t even exist. Yet the weekend, involving the warm, open conversing between the two once-icy contingents, would change everyone, “humanize officials” and bring the much-needed Cold War thaw.
More personalities than arms arcana, infused by a deep reverence for his man.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-231019-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Broadside Books/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2014
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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