A showcase, in effect, for the attractive personality and deep-held convictions of octogenarian Milton Eisenhower—with little of the zest, acumen, or substantive interest of his memoir The President Is Calling. On the basis that Eisenhower dealt there with his public life, Ambrose and Immerman concentrate on his career in higher education—as president of Kansas State, Penn State, and Johns Hopkins—an area in which they're admittedly not expert. (Immerman also collaborated with Ambrose on Ike's Spies.) Exuding fondness for their subject, they adhere closely to the homespun Eisenhower family image in which he believes (more so, indeed, than Ambrose's latest biography of Dwight Eisenhower, above); yet they term some of his ideas "simplistic"—and two pages later, quote from a thoughtful, Étude-by-Étude Eisenhower appreciation of Chopin. His individuality, in short, eludes them. And even in this truncated account, the early years—Kansas newspapering, meteoric rise in the Agriculture Dept., FDR confidant and aide—most repay the reading: at least things happen. Ambrose and Immerman do try, reiteratively, to develop some themes: Eisenhower's preference for "an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary approach"; his reliance on subordinates; his bent toward "conciliation" (and distaste for confrontation); his warmth, hospitality, outreach (toward students especially)—and his "extreme sensitivity to criticism" (the reason, plausibly, he stayed out of politics). Treating of Eisenhower the higher-educator, they produce only a patchwork of achievements (artificially balanced with the criticisms of detractors). Eisenhower, we're told, liberalized the curriculum and internationalized the student body at "cow college" Kansas State; rid Penn State of its inferiority complex and turned it into a real university; twice put Johns Hopkins on its financial feet—while preserving its small/elite tradition. Everywhere he excelled at legislative lobbying and general fund-raising, and instituted citizenship programs; usually he was admired, and got his way. (In a loyalty-oath crisis at Penn State, however, he looks less than a shining light.) The concluding chapters expand on his current distress with the US (he's fervently for gun control) and his active, good-humored aging. Some future biographer will be grateful for the authors' interview-materials—for present readers, they've been used too earnestly and unimaginatively.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1983
ISBN: 0801892678
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Johns Hopkins Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1983
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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