Blumenthal’s astute understanding of history allows him to ably demonstrate the significance of good leadership.
Memoir/history of the political leadership of the 20th century, from the former secretary of the treasury under President Jimmy Carter.
Blumenthal’s (The Invisible Wall: The Mystery of the Germans and the Jews, 1998) childhood in Nazi Germany and his family’s exile in the Shanghai ghetto produced a perceptive man who would watch and report the changes of the 20th century. Shanghai’s thousands of refugees managed to fend for themselves (they “were expected to administer their own affairs”) with doctors, a hospital, music, theater, libraries and a few different newspapers. Young Blumenthal spent his teenage years absorbing the various languages of Shanghai, learning the life of the streets and understanding that nothing would ever come easy. Throughout the book, he chronicles the vast changes that took place in the world and especially in Germany and China. Taking advantage of the state’s free education, he took a degree at Berkeley and moved on to Princeton’s Public Affairs program. His assignments in the Kennedy and Carter administrations, his work as trade representative and his many years as a corporate CEO allowed him to meet with leaders around the world. This is his memoir, so he can include what he likes, but his successes in the corporate world aren’t nearly as interesting as his opinions of world leaders. He views Hitler, Stalin, FDR, Churchill and Deng Xiaoping as the most influential leaders of the 20th century. His dealings with and impressions of world leaders such as Menachem Begin, the shah of Iran and Zhou Enlai are only part of his diverse insight into 20th-century history.
Blumenthal’s astute understanding of history allows him to ably demonstrate the significance of good leadership.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4683-0729-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2013
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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