In this monumental (752-page) review of Reagan's White House years, veteran Washington Post correspondent and Reagan-watcher Cannon (Reagan, 1982; Ronnie and Jessie, 1969) cements his reputation as one of the fairest and most knowledgeable reporters on the former President of his legacy. Although adhering primarily to a sympathetic view of the Great Communicator as an American visionary, Cannon still presents Reagan warts and all. From his first political victory, a landslide win over Pat Brown for governor of California, Reagan, Cannon shows, demonstrates his knack for reading an audience and being able to deliver a script. Elected President, he had the additional good fortune to arrive in Washington with a dedicated corps of aides who could prepare him, and protect him, extremely well. Patterns established in Reagan's earlier stint in public office survived the transition to the White House, with the nuts and bolts of governing delegated to trusted advisers such as Jim Baker, Michael Deaver, Ed Meese, and others, while the President was called in for policy decisions, to offer Hollywood anecdotes or touches of ``the vision thing,'' as then- Vice President George Bush referred to it, or to function as arbiter in the event of a dispute between factions-the result of which was invariably a compromise intended to mollify both parties. During his second term, Reagan's increasingly loose hand on the tiller, whether caused by disinterest or the ravages of old age, created crises large and small, the Iran-contra debacle among them. The historical highlights ranging from supply-side economics, deregulation, and tax reform to Nicaragua, Lebanon, and the Evil Empire are assessed by Cannon in detail, through published and private accounts and interviews recorded at the time and after the fact, with all major participants receiving the same insightful, objective attention. Complementing Garry Wills's Reagan's America (1986), this is a generous and informative commentary of a presidency that will not soon be forgotten. (Book-of-the-Month Dual Selection for July)
Pub Date: April 29, 1991
ISBN: 0-671-54294-X
Page Count: 752
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1991
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
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