A massive, occasionally bloated (will the next volume also run over 1,000 pages?) study of the formation of the young...
Exhaustive account of the first half of Kissinger’s life as a “tale of an education through experience.”
Courted by Kissinger to write this biography 10 years ago (“it was written at his suggestion”), Hoover Institution senior research fellow Ferguson (History, Harvard Univ.; The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die, 2013, etc.) is both fascinated and seduced by the dazzling intellectual breadth of the senior statesman, now in his 90s. From Kissinger’s childhood in Germany, as the Nazis were ascendant, to participating in the official U.S. diplomatic effort to end the Vietnam War, the author finds Kissinger’s development falling into formative stages: seeing his civil servant father stripped of his livelihood and the family terrorized as Orthodox Jews before escaping to New York in 1938; returning to Germany via the Army Specialized Training Program during World War II, followed by de-Nazification work in the ruins of the Third Reich; schooling at Harvard courtesy of the GI Bill, where he found an important mentor in William Elliott and the choice of history for his academic work, specifically the sometimes-fraught choices that freedom awards an individual; his role as a public intellectual, writing about the new “great game” in “psychological warfare” just as the Cold War was heating up; and, finally, the harsh lessons he gained in political reality as adviser to Nelson Rockefeller and as one of John F. Kennedy’s fallible “best and brightest.” In his pronouncements on the war in Vietnam, Ferguson insists Kissinger was an idealist first and foremost: he was “committed to resisting the Communist advance and an advocate of ‘limited war.’ ” Bit by bit, Kissinger was becoming a foreign policy expert with “few rivals.” Ferguson also gives a thorough—sometimes long-winded—assessment of Kissinger’s use of conjecture and risk in policymaking.
A massive, occasionally bloated (will the next volume also run over 1,000 pages?) study of the formation of the young Kissinger, before the idealist became a realist with his selection by President Richard Nixon as national security adviser in 1968.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-59420-653-5
Page Count: 1008
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
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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