A nostalgic portrait of the last presidency.
The chronicle of a political “bromance.”
Journalist Levingston (Kennedy and King: The President, the Pastor, and the Battle Over Civil Rights, 2017, etc.), nonfiction book editor of the Washington Post, examines the partnership between Barack Obama and Joe Biden, which, the author gushes, “evolved into a friendship of profound depth, one never before witnessed in the history of the American presidency.” His admiration for this relationship serves to justify this book. Unfortunately for Levingston, neither Obama nor Biden consented to interviews or replied to emails, although he did manage to interview sources such as Obama’s senior adviser David Axelrod, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, and Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken. From those responses, along with videos, blogs, twitter posts, various media reports, speeches, and the protagonists’ memoirs—all public documents—Levingston weaves a lively narrative about an unlikely alliance between the taciturn Obama and gregarious, voluble Biden. After an initially cool assessment of one another, growing mutual respect led Obama to choose Biden for vice president due to his experience and skill working with Congress, his popularity among working-class voters, and their agreement “on matters of international import.” Obama, Levingston maintains, admired Biden’s personal story: “his character in the face of profound setbacks,” his willingness to question “the meaning of life and his place in it,” and his “devotion to his family,” traits that Obama felt he shared. The author stretches to include any commonalities he can identify—for example, that both men used sports metaphors. Nevertheless, as Levingston recounts their relationship during the campaign’s high and low points and throughout eight years of facing economic, social, and military crises, he points out many occasions when the two men seemed close. In particular, Obama’s demonstrative sympathy for Biden when his son Beau died of brain cancer is compelling evidence of the sincerity of his friendship and love. But the author is at a loss to explain Obama’s reticence in supporting Biden’s current campaign for the presidency, and he ends simply by proclaiming the bromance mesmerizing and inspiring.
A nostalgic portrait of the last presidency.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-316-48786-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Hachette
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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