A lively one-volume treatment well-suited to libraries and schools.
This focused study of the four term–winning president emphasizes his instinctive feel for the public mood.
Having previously written extensively about John F. Kennedy (Camelot’s Court and An Unfinished Life), among other presidents and world leaders (Nixon and Kissinger, The Lost Peace, Lone Star Rising, etc.), Dallek is a seasoned presidential historian and biographer. Here, he writes with authority about Franklin Roosevelt’s political life and mission to create a “new social order” during a time of “enduring national transformation.” Throughout his remarkable political career, Roosevelt managed to steer the country as “one organic entity, [reaffirming] that no interest, no class, no section, is either separate or supreme above the interests of all”—views he expressed in an interview before his first presidential win in 1932. This was especially surprising given his own patrician background (also that of his wife and cousin, Eleanor) and the general expectation of dictatorial leadership during the Depression crisis. Dallek examines several formative factors that contributed greatly to Roosevelt’s ability to successfully tap the public sentiment and address significant issues—e.g., his three years of practicing law, which helped bring him “out from under the shelter” of his hereditary social circle of “Hyde Park, Campobello, Cambridge, and 65th Street”; his formidably kind wife, who was truly alarmed by the living conditions of the poor and disenfranchised where she toured during the Depression, operating as his eyes and ears; and, of course, being stricken by polio and his trips to Warm Springs, Georgia, where he mingled with the similarly afflicted and marginalized. The author also effectively shows how Roosevelt was an astute political animal who sometimes made questionable decisions for political expedience, such as failing to push for an anti-lynching law for fear of losing white Southern support, incarcerating Japanese-Americans during World War II, and fumbling over saving Jews from persecution by Nazi Germany.
A lively one-volume treatment well-suited to libraries and schools.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-525-42790-2
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2017
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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