The second of three installments in an ambitious biography of one of the century's most perplexing and beguiling politicians. Volume tree left off with Nixon's "last press conference" after he lost the 1962 California gubernatorial election. Ambrose sets the tone for this second book by demonstrating that almost immediately after that "farewell" to politics, Nixon began painstakingly to construct his own personal resurrection—and attained the Presidency only six years later. Those six years and the four of Nixon's first term are the purview of this volume—which, unfortunately, does not rivet the attention as did the first. Perhaps this is because in recounting the early life, Ambrose had the luxury of discovering much that was unknown about Nixon's roots. Or perhaps it is because the major focus here is the tedious explication of political positions—the endless excerpts from Nixon speeches, writings, and interviews. And perhaps it is because (no fault of Ambrose) readers may be satiated by this most written-about president—if only from the prolific pen of Nixon himself. At any rate, to veteran observers of Nixon's triumphal years, there is really very little new offered here. The author is somewhat more repulsed by Nixon ascendant than he was by Nixon the apprentice: the campaign of 1968 is described as one of the most "loathsome" in memory; Nixon's admiration for Kissinger is based on a mutual basis of "secrecy, rumor, intrigue"; Nixon is pictured as motivated by unyielding insecurity and anxiety, continually in quest of Eisenhower's illusive imprimatur. A thorough but uninspired account of Nixon's middle years.
Pub Date: Oct. 19, 1989
ISBN: 0671725068
Page Count: 736
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1989
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
