A critical but resolutely objective and utterly fascinating biography of the guileful, egocentric geopolitical scientist who became America's most celebrated secretary of state. Drawing on access to his subject's private papers, family members, friends, and foes, as well as on archival sources, Isaacson (an assistant managing editor at Time; coauthor, The Wise Men, 1986) offers an authoritative and comprehensive account. Tracking Kissinger from his boyhood as a persecuted Jew in Nazi Germany through his current estate as a globe-trotting business consultant who turns 70 next May, the author notes that Kissinger has displayed a knack for attracting influential patrons throughout his career. This talent served Kissinger well as an Army intelligence operative during WW II, at Harvard (where he earned a Ph.D. and professorship), and as a cold-war strategist who made a name for himself advising think tanks and government agencies. Latching on to an ultimate sponsor, he joined the Nixon Administration in 1969; survived Watergate largely unscathed; gained worldwide fame (plus a Nobel Peace Prize) for negotiating an end to the Vietnam War; and won even greater renown for feats of shuttle diplomacy in Africa, the Mideast, and elsewhere. While Isaacson gives Kissinger full marks for his many accomplishments in foreign policy, he minces few words in recounting the secretiveness, devotion to Realpolitik, and personal insecurities that gained Kissinger a reputation for Dr. Strangelove-like duplicity. Although Kissinger consistently had the courage of his conviction—that those engaged in statecraft must deal with ambiguities and accommodations—Isaacson concludes that a general perception of Kissinger's ruthlessness frequently cost him dearly owing to Americans' allegiance to human rights, democratic principles, the rule of international law, and other idealistic values. An evenhanded, warts-and-all portrait of a larger-than-life individual who has left his mark behind.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 0-671-66323-2
Page Count: 960
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
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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