Right book, right author.
National Review senior editor Brookhiser (George Washington on Leadership, 2008, etc.) recalls his writing life.
No history of the modern conservative movement would be complete without a healthy chapter on William F. Buckley’s opinion magazine, National Review, founded in 1955. Brookhiser’s adolescence coincided perfectly with that of the magazine—in 1970, at the remarkable age of 14, he published his first article there. The author arrived early enough on the NR scene to absorb the in-house lore surrounding the likes of Whittaker Chambers, James Burnham, Russell Kirk, Garry Wills and other contributors. Rising quickly from summer intern to writer, managing editor and, at 23, senior editor, Brookhiser was tapped to succeed Buckley as editor-in-chief. The author was stunned to have the offer unexpectedly withdrawn a few years later. Baffled and resentful, he embarked on a new career as a freelancer and historian, never severing his ties to the magazine or to Buckley. He enjoyed the steady paycheck, of course, but as this memoir makes clear, life at NR was just too interesting and too much fun. Brookhiser’s wonderfully conversational, occasionally confessional, frequently witty account contains numerous stories about the magazine’s daily operations and its rise from the political margins to the white-hot center of the Reagan Revolution. Sprinkled throughout are amusing snapshots of the startling array of talent—Paul Gigot, George Will and Terry Teachout, among many others—who passed through its doors. More than anything, though, Brookhiser reflects on his maturation as a thinker, writer and a man who for too long measured his worth against the glittering Buckley, his spiritual father, inspiration, boss and friend. Old enough now to appreciate the misunderstandings on both sides, chastened by a bout with cancer and distinguished in his own right as a historian, Brookhiser’s eyes-wide-open appraisal of his mentor is deeply affectionate.
Right book, right author.Pub Date: June 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-465-01355-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2009
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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