Recommended reading for aspiring diplomats and foreign policy wonks.
A revealing memoir of life behind the diplomatic curtains.
As New York Times contributing opinion writer Rice opens her account, the Trump team is taking over the White House from Obama, for whom she served as ambassador to the U.N. A work crew is removing a carpet into which is woven a quotation from Martin Luther King Jr.: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” It’s a telling moment, speaking pointedly to an atmosphere in which her young daughter suffered from stress over how her mother was treated during the Benghazi affair. “Washington’s politics of personal destruction don’t come free of cost,” she notes. Her story recounts aspiration and affirmation, as her parents battled against the racism that dogged her father even as he served in World War II, “profoundly objecting to the insult and irony of being made to fight for freedom for all but his own people.” Her father would become an economics professor, and her parents taught Rice “the merits of fierce, often cocky contention” that combined assuredness with a command of the facts. Her education in diplomacy, following school at Stanford and Oxford, was augmented by the likes of Richard Clarke (“gruff, sarcastic, whip-smart, someone who pulls no punches”) and Obama, who forgave Rice for an ill-advised comment comparing how he and John McCain would react to the proverbial 3:00 a.m. phone call on some matter of war or peace. “I was tacitly benched for a few weeks and given only safer opportunities by the campaign to appear public, until the furor died down,” she writes. Her book is frequently engaging though perhaps a quarter too long, and it is peppered with such critical moments as well as defenses of her stances in support of Israel and against an intransigent Russia. She closes, as one might expect, with a sharp critique of the successor administration and the “zero-sum partisan outcomes” of national politics today.
Recommended reading for aspiring diplomats and foreign policy wonks.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-8997-5
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 24, 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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