A warmly sympathetic biography of a spirited woman.
A first lady who overcame breast cancer and addictions became an inspiration for many Americans.
Former TV news anchor and reporter McCubbin (co-author, with Clint Hill: Five Presidents: My Extraordinary Journey with Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford, 2016, etc.) felt the spirit of Betty Ford (1918-2011) encouraging her as she wrote. “There is little doubt in my mind,” she writes, “that she orchestrated this entire process.” Drawing largely on Ford’s two memoirs and interviews with her children and others close to her, the author fashions an admiring portrait of a woman who faced physical and emotional challenges. A former dancer and model, Betty was a divorced 30-year-old when she married Michigan lawyer Gerald Ford and soon followed him to Washington, D.C., after he won a congressional seat. Being a Washington wife could be difficult: As Jerry’s political responsibilities increased, he traveled constantly, leaving Betty with four active children and the feeling that “the more important her husband became, the less important she was.” Low self-esteem, though, did not keep her from campaigning energetically for Jerry, entertaining, and participating in various clubs and organizations. At home, a full-time housekeeper compensated for a mother who “wasn’t emotionally available” to her children. Despite persistent stage fright, Betty spoke publicly in support of women’s equality, abortion, and even premarital sex, earning praise for her forthright revelation about her bout with breast cancer. In 1964, a pinched nerve caused overwhelming chronic pain, precipitating Betty’s reliance on painkillers, which escalated so dramatically that by 1977, she swallowed handfuls of pills morning and night, along with more than a few drinks. Besides pain, she suffered from depression, which McCubbin does not deeply probe. Although she portrays the couple as deeply devoted, as Betty sank into alcoholism and drug dependency, Jerry refused to confront the problem. Like many families of addicts, different members took on “various codependent roles in order to cope: enabler, hero, scapegoat, lost child, mascot.” Finally overcoming her addictions, Betty went on to co-found a well-regarded treatment center.
A warmly sympathetic biography of a spirited woman.Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6468-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
