Useful reading for those in a similar position, whether in the public or private sector, and a strong case for better...
Entrepreneur and philanthropist Solomont writes of her tour of duty as the wife of the U.S. ambassador to Spain and Andorra—an unpaid position, she pointedly notes, but a full-time one.
When Barack Obama appointed Alan Solomont to represent the U.S. before the governments of Spain and Andorra in 2009, the author stepped into a “diminutive role of ‘ambassador’s spouse.’ ” At the ambassadorial equivalent of boot camp, each student was given a thick binder full of information about all the ambassadors in training, but it included nothing about their spouses. What was immediately clear was that those spouses were not allowed to work while in service, leaving unwelcome gaps in their employment history and Social Security contributions, all because of the potential for conflict of interest. “Acquiescence is not in my DNA,” writes the author. “If there wasn’t a meaningful role for me to fill—something that would allow me to put my own skills and intelligence to work—then I would create one.” The role she created included helping Spanish olive growers develop branding strategies, mentoring women in business, and, in the end, becoming “somewhat of a mini maven when it comes to Spain, learning everything I could about the country.” Meanwhile, she recounts, her husband helped forge a stronger relationship between the U.S. and the Spanish government, especially by developing a friendship with King Juan Carlos, whom the ambassador gave credit for the “leadership and vision” that allowed the nation to emerge from under the shadow of the long Franco dictatorship. Although her protestations against State Department policies regarding spouses come too frequently and repetitively, it is clear that Solomont made the most of the opportunities presented by “the mixed blessing of a relatively blank slate.”
Useful reading for those in a similar position, whether in the public or private sector, and a strong case for better defining the roles of diplomatic spouses, to say nothing of paying them for their work.Pub Date: March 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63331-030-8
Page Count: 276
Publisher: Disruption Books
Review Posted Online: April 8, 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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