An average political memoir containing strong speculation that her next action will be a bid for the White House.
A memoir suggesting that if there are problems within the Trump administration, the problem is not Trump.
As a tea party candidate who became governor of South Carolina, Haley (Can’t Is Not an Option: My American Story, 2012) first established herself as a political star on the rise—young, female, and minority, all areas where the Republican Party had been perceived as weakest. With the election of Trump, she was recruited to become the United Nations ambassador, though her governorship hadn’t involved any foreign diplomacy, nor did her straight-shooting demeanor as a self-described “badass” suggest a diplomatic personality, nor had she supported Trump during the primary campaign. Thus, the most remarkable part of this memoir, in contrast to the onslaught of Trump exposés, is her account of how well she worked with the president, how they established a relationship based on mutual respect and trust, how she was able to disagree with him without drawing his ire, and how she was able to leave her U.N. post on good terms. If others had problems with this president, she suggests it was their fault. Her memoir generated plenty of pre-publication publicity for its accounts of her skirmishes with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and her allegation that he and John Kelly had attempted to enlist her in a conspiracy to circumvent the president’s policies. “Whether they sincerely believed they were doing the right thing or just pushing their personal agendas, these people were dangerous,” writes Haley. By contrast, you always knew where you stood with the president, or at least she felt she did. Because of their “open and honest communication,” she writes, “in an administration in which so many people’s negative relationship with the president was their undoing, my relationship with President Trump was a positive. Our styles were different, but we were both fundamentally disrupters of the status quo. And we were both action-oriented.”
An average political memoir containing strong speculation that her next action will be a bid for the White House.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-26655-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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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