A useful biography, though overwritten and overlength; of particular interest to students of contemporary European politics.
An impressively thorough but tepid life of Spain’s reigning Bourbon monarch, who helped foster democracy after the dark decades of the Franco junta.
The hard-nosed dictator—who is, yes, still dead—had little use for the monarchy: he harbored reasonable suspicions that the Bourbons were inclined to liberal views, and he was quite happy to see them in exile in Switzerland. His attitude softened when, in 1946, the UN denounced Franco’s government as an Axis regime, in fact if not in name, and “invited him to surrender the powers of government.” Franco, determined to have his regime accepted as legitimate, promulgated a law of succession that declared that Spain was a Catholic kingdom with a monarch in residence—but, of course, with Franco sitting at the head of government. To emphasize this succession, Franco called for nine-year-old Juan Carlos, the heir to the Bourbon throne, to return to Spain and study under his tutelage. Juan Carlos did so, demonstrating a regal equanimity in the face of “the fact that his father, Don Juan, to all intents and purposes sold him into slavery.” As Preston (History/London School of Economics; Franco, 1994) shows at altogether too much length, Juan Carlos absorbed the teachings of Don Francisco while keeping the liberal flame alive; on a state visit to the US, Juan Carlos told officials of the Nixon administration that he intended to steer his country toward democracy, plans that Franco was surely aware of and perhaps, Preston suggests, even approved of. Franco’s death in November 1975 brought considerable resistance on the part of fascist loyalists, and a short-lived military coup in 1981; yet Juan Carlos managed to steer a middle course, restore democratic institutions, keep the army from seizing power, weather Basque terrorism and regional separatism, and elevate Spain from historical afterthought to its present prosperity and prominence.
A useful biography, though overwritten and overlength; of particular interest to students of contemporary European politics.Pub Date: June 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-393-05804-2
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2004
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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