Foreign policy master, political brawler, family man, loner, tragic hero, criminal, elder statesman, eternal conniver—Richard Nixon plays all of these roles in the final installment of Ambrose's fascinating three-volume biography (1987, 1989) of the ex-President. Ambrose (History/Univ. of New Orleans) meticulously traces how Nixon—flush with triumph from his landslide reelection victory over George McGovern—spoiled, through his mishandling of Watergate, his best-laid plans for reorganizing the executive branch of the government and for achieving a durable peace in Vietnam and with the Soviet Union. There aren't many surprises here about this extensively documented portion of Nixon's life, but Ambrose compensates with an excellent assessment of his subject's character and record. The author underscores what America lost, as a result of Nixon's Icarus-like fall, in such areas as arms control, energy policy, the Mideast, and national health insurance (though, dubiously, he bemoans the Reagan Revolution without acknowledging how much it owed to Nixon's polarizing campaigns). Admiring Nixon's perseverance, Ambrose draws a sympathetic portrait of the beleaguered politician's attempts to handle a vain Henry Kissinger, military top brass contemptuous of dÉtente, even politicians and lawyers unnerved by Nixon's blatant disregard for the Constitution. In the end, despite appreciating Nixon's intelligence and ability, Ambrose scores the President for a lack of domestic achievements and an even more demonstrable lack of virtue. An adroit retelling of how Nixon plunged into his political black hole—and why, like Lady Macbeth's "damned spot," and despite his carefully orchestrated comeback, his role in the Watergate cover-up can never be obliterated.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-671-69188-0
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1991
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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