Poignant reading on the 20th anniversary of Kennedy’s death and of broad interest to students of American political...
An unvarnished portrait of the Kennedy scion who seemed to command all his parents’ charisma—and who met a tragic, early end.
History Channel scholar-in-residence Gillon (History/Univ. of Oklahoma; Separate and Unequal: The Kerner Commission and the Unraveling of American Liberalism, 2018, etc.) writes as both professional historian and friend—not close friend, he allows, but close enough to have had plenty of face time—of John F. Kennedy Jr. (1960-1999), who “understood what he represented to millions of people, and he was willing to assume that burden.” That self-awareness took some time to develop. By the author’s account, the usual adolescent rebellion blended with unusual privilege, and John Jr. was somewhat slow in attaining adulthood in a whirl of partying and slacking off. (Still, he was much better behaved than Bobby Kennedy’s offspring, who “were overly wild.”) In the end, breaking with the family’s Harvard tradition and going to Brown, John Jr. emerged as a person of substance, someone who was able to weave the stories of his father’s and relatives’ iconic lives into “a coherent narrative” and to figure out how to make a place for himself in that line. He did so with the magazine George, launched in 1995, which, Gillon ventures, was ahead of its time in many ways, pointing to the emergence of politicians as not just politicians, but also as figures in pop culture. Bill Clinton provided plenty of gossip, but while the timing of the magazine was right in some ways, it was soon supplanted by political talk shows that “turned talking heads into media stars." Gillon writes with a practitioner’s appreciation for historical narrative, but he doesn’t hesitate to pitch a little dirt here and there, as when he writes of family feuds, marital discord, and other things publicists like to keep out of view.
Poignant reading on the 20th anniversary of Kennedy’s death and of broad interest to students of American political dynasties.Pub Date: July 9, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4238-6
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: July 10, 2019
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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