A thoughtful resurrection of a brilliant man who, aside from the Founding Fathers, did more good before taking office than...
A biography of Herbert Hoover (1874-1964) meant “to spring [him] from the Depression and present him in another context, that of his full life.”
Hoover was president for four unhappy years but was an extraordinary figure for more than 70. In this fat, intensely researched, mostly admiring biography, National Post founding editor Whyte (The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst, 2009) makes a convincing case for his rehabilitation and succeeds in providing “a faithful portrait of the man in his times.” After graduating from Stanford, he won rapid promotion and wealth managing mines in Australia and China with brilliant if ruthless efficiency and then resigned to prosper as an independent consultant. Soon after the outbreak of war in 1914, it was obvious that the Belgians, conquered by Germany, were starving. In one of the greatest individual humanitarian acts in history, Hoover created an immense, successful food relief effort that required prodigious diplomatic, financial, and organizational skills. It also made him world famous. Appointed secretary of commerce, he was the most dynamic government figure of the 1920s and easily won the presidency in 1928. Everyone knows what happened then. Whyte dismisses the traditional view that Hoover failed to address the Depression. He expanded public works and backed programs such as the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, later taken up by the New Deal. Sadly, he opposed direct government relief, insisting that states and philanthropies could handle it. A lack of charisma and dour personality gave him an undeserved reputation for heartlessness. He took defeat in 1932 bitterly and hated the New Deal. Whyte concludes that Hoover’s vision of a “bottom-up America rooted in individual freedom, public service, and strong self-sufficient communities, encouraged by a limited federal government, seemed by his death a relic of another era,” yet it has come back into fashion.
A thoughtful resurrection of a brilliant man who, aside from the Founding Fathers, did more good before taking office than any other president in American history.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-307-59796-0
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
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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