A smart and plainspoken—if sometimes obviously self-serving—insider’s view of the military-industrial-governmental complex....
Former Secretary of Defense Gates doesn’t exactly bare all in this politically charged memoir, but he doesn’t pull many punches, either.
It’s clear, from just the first few pages, that the job of the head civilian administrator of the military (second to the commander in chief, that is, the president) is a thoroughly political one. It becomes clearer, as the tale progresses, that some politicians are more palatable than others. Gates maintains a mostly respectful tone when it comes to the current commander in chief, though it’s quite evident that his views are qualified: In trying to explain the personalities of Afghanistan commander Stanley McChrystal and Iraq commander David Petraeus and their dynamics with President Barack Obama, Gates writes, “my assurances fell pretty much on deaf ears, which I found enormously frustrating and discouraging.” Gates also unleashes on the current Congress: “Uncivil, incompetent in fulfilling basic constitutional responsibilities (such as timely appropriations), micromanagerial, parochial, hypocritical, egotistical, thin-skinned, too often putting self (and reelection) before country.” Pow! The author emerges as a canny administrator who struck a number of right notes in entering the administration, first under George W. Bush and then Obama. He came alone, without a phalanx of support staff, and he came prepared to speak his mind, not disguising his belief that “the Pentagon was buying too many weapons more suited to the Cold War than to the twenty-first century.” Yet, he was not quite able to transform the military, as he had envisioned, into the fast-moving, lean force of the future, so that what we have today remains vast, overfed and, yes, thoroughly politicized.
A smart and plainspoken—if sometimes obviously self-serving—insider’s view of the military-industrial-governmental complex. Sure to spark plenty of discussion inside the Beltway.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-307-95947-8
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Nov. 13, 2013
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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