Not an exciting account but a solid record of a terrifically significant public career.
A methodical memoir of a long, top-level government career developing nuclear deterrence strategy.
The former secretary of defense during President Bill Clinton’s first term, as well as an accomplished Stanford University scholar, Perry straightforwardly tracks his life’s journey in terms of a growing awareness that the only defense against nuclear attack is “to prevent the attack from happening.” Too young to serve in World War II, the Pennsylvania-born math whiz was barely 18 when he enlisted as an Army engineer and observed firsthand the bombing devastation of postwar Japan. The rise of the Soviet missile threat defined his early years of graduate work at Stanford, which were followed by a job as a senior scientist at Sylvania’s Electronic Defense Laboratories. An original entrepreneur in Silicon Valley with his own company, Electromagnetic Systems Laboratory, and dedicated to Cold War intelligence work using new digital technology, Perry was plucked by Harold Brown to serve as his undersecretary of defense for research and engineering in 1977. He gradually began to see that the old way of thinking about keeping up with the Soviets and ensuring an “offset strategy” was outdated, “a colossal failure of imagination.” What was needed was diplomacy—e.g., dealing with China, NATO, and Israel-Egyptian peace talks at Camp David. A critic of the Strategic Defense Initiative, aka Star Wars, Perry actively participated in nongovernmental international diplomacy, Track II, to develop new paths of understanding with Russian scientists and academics. When he returned to Washington, D.C., in 1993, Perry was in a unique position to deal with the dismantling of nuclear weapons left as the legacy of the Cold War, enforced by Nunn-Lugar legislation. Perry recounts tackling one containment crisis after another during his tenure, from North Korea to Bosnia to Haiti. Having worked so hard to neutralize the Soviet–U.S. relationship, Perry is especially anguished at the new tension with Putin’s Russia.
Not an exciting account but a solid record of a terrifically significant public career.Pub Date: Nov. 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8047-9712-2
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Stanford Security Studies/Stanford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2015
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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