An important man in his day, neither of Cutler's secret lives now appears sufficiently interesting to merit the attention of...
A biography of Robert Cutler (1895-1974), novelist, Boston banker, and President Dwight Eisenhower's first assistant for national security affairs, the position known today as National Security Advisor.
Cutler, journalist Shinkle’s great-uncle, served in this capacity from 1952 to 1955 and again from 1957 to 1958. Eisenhower later appointed him executive director of the Inter-American Development Bank, which was established to fight communism by encouraging economic development in Latin America. Although quite the bon vivant in Boston, during his stint in Washington, D.C., Cutler shunned the limelight, leading him to be dubbed "the Mystery Man of the White House." One reason for remaining in the shadows was that Cutler was gay. He and several highly placed gay friends somehow survived the dragnets of the Joseph McCarthy era's "Lavender Scare," when gays were driven from government as security risks. Cutler was never outed during his lifetime, though he took no extraordinary measures to conceal his lifestyle and showed little concern for his job security. In his multivolume diary, he poured out his unrequited desires for a committed relationship with a much younger protégé in florid and extravagant language. So oppressive were Cutler's emotional demands that they became smothering, interfering with friendships and at times evidencing an alarming instability. In his debut book, the author alternates between these two secret lives; neither portion is notably successful. The coverage of Cutler's National Security Council days includes such significant events as U.S.–sponsored coups in Guatemala and Iran, but the narrative is straightforward and dry; if it contains any new revelations, Shinkle does not highlight them. He describes Cutler's various rendezvous with gay men in gaudy detail, but to no apparent purpose. Cutler's diary entries illustrate the depths of his feelings for these men but never broach subjects of wider significance—e.g., the predicament of a gay man in a hostile governmental and social culture.
An important man in his day, neither of Cutler's secret lives now appears sufficiently interesting to merit the attention of 21st-century readers.Pub Date: Dec. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-58642-243-1
Page Count: 428
Publisher: Steerforth
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2018
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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