Of much interest to students of political history, and sure to excite discussion in academic circles.
A carefully researched study of a curious, well-hidden episode in American presidential history.
Shortly after the death of his wife Ellen in 1914, newly elected president Woodrow Wilson met and quickly fell in love with society matron Edith Bolling Galt, described by former New York Times reporter and historian Levin as a woman of “opulent figure and commanding air.” Edith, who soon married Wilson, made for an unusually diligent First Lady, studying world events and Wilson's own voluminous writing, and familiarizing herself with the intricacies of party politics. Their pillow talk evidently touched on matters of state as much as anything more personal, as when Wilson “discussed with Edith his apprehensions about the serious effects of [Secretary of State William Jennings] Bryan’s resignation on the country and on his administration” and the wording of his official remarks on the U-boat sinking of the Lusitania. (The two also shared a vigorous loathing for the prospect of women gaining the vote. “Nothing in the course of those tragic years of war,” writes Levin, “seemed personally to repel Edith or Wilson so much as the women activists who picketed for suffrage.”) When, midway through his second term, Wilson suffered a massive stroke, Edith was well up to the task of serving as his proxy—a role that the White House steadfastly denied, insisting that the president was merely unwell, and remained fully in control. Edith kept up her side of the ruse, but, imperious and fiercely loyal, she also managed to alienate politicians already opposed to Wilson's programs, chief among them Senator Henry Cabot Lodge. Had Wilson ceded control to the vice president instead of retaining it through his wife, Levin suggests, then he might have been successful in gaining support for the League of Nations instead of enduring a disastrous political defeat.
Of much interest to students of political history, and sure to excite discussion in academic circles.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2001
ISBN: 0-7432-1158-8
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2001
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
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