A mostly sweet biography with occasional small drops of none-too-bitter acid.
A deeply admiring biography of the former first lady.
Veteran journalist Page, who is currently the Washington Bureau chief of USA Today and has covered six presidential administrations, had the good fortune to conduct five interviews with Barbara Bush (1925-2018) in her final months, and, as the author notes, “her mind was sharp to the end.” Also sharp was Bush’s tongue—so much so that even her own sons had to ask her to tone it down. Page begins with Bush’s memorial service in Houston and then moves to her most wrenching experience—the loss of her daughter, 3, to leukemia in 1953—before settling into a steady chronology of her revered subject. The author notes that Barbara Pierce (not yet Bush) had a difficult relationship with her own mother, who demeaned her for her appearance. She met her future husband at a country club party shortly after Pearl Harbor, and they married a few years later. Then they moved to Texas to start their lives—and successfully so. Page takes us through their campaigns, victories, losses, and disappointments. As the author notes, Bush assumed a traditional wife/homemaker/mother role while her husband made many of the decisions for the family. This choice did not endear her to feminists of the time. She would not criticize her husband (or, later, her sons) in public, though during the 1980 presidential campaign (her husband was running to be Reagan’s vice president), she fell silent about her support for abortion rights, and, later, she was displeased with her son’s entanglement in Iraq. The author also explains the Bushes’ growing friendship with the Clintons. Opponents of Donald Trump have an ally in Barbara Bush, who disliked him long before he disparaged her son Jeb in the 2016 primaries. In a late interview, she also expressed unhappiness about the current course and priorities of the GOP.
A mostly sweet biography with occasional small drops of none-too-bitter acid.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5387-1364-8
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: April 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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