A life that encapsulates American progressivism over the past half-century in both its strengths and weaknesses—and who...
Human-rights partisan Neier (War Crimes, 1998) looks back over a career working with the ACLU, Human Rights Watch, the Open Society Institute, and the Soros Foundation.
The author treats readers to his personal forays into the politics of the age, from the kindling of SDS (though he fled that group even before the Port Huron Statement) to his stints at the helms of the ACLU and Human Rights Watch. The years 1963–93 were eventful ones in the struggle for civil and political rights, and Neier explains his and his organizations’ positions on everything from abortion rights, fighting the compulsory commitment of drug addicts (he concludes that deinstitutionalization was “a civil liberties success but . . . a social policy failure”), to struggles against gerrymandering and for the right of the Skokie Klan members to voice their beliefs. Much of Neier’s later work involved monitoring violations in armed conflicts: “My most significant contribution to the protection of human rights,” he believes, though one might argue that the vibrancy of the organizations he nominally headed could take that honor. Neier’s style does not here match his substance; in what might generously be referred to as flat prose, a lawyerly precision trumps obvious storytelling possibilities, and there haven’t been this many references to Trotskyites, Schachtmanites, and other “ites” since disgruntled Cold War leftists stopped hurling insults at each other. It’s sometimes possible to fault Neier on content as well: he makes a legitimate point in distinguishing between the universality of human rights versus the particularity of economic rights, but he fails to persuade when he says that the very notion of economic rights “is based on the view that the allocation of resources may not be entrusted to the institutions and processes through which democratic will is exercised.”
A life that encapsulates American progressivism over the past half-century in both its strengths and weaknesses—and who would argue against the fight to safeguard human civil and political rights?Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-891620-82-7
Page Count: 416
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2002
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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