Patriotic musings based on creampuff interviews with some men who were once the most powerful on earth.
Columnist and prolific author Greene (Once Upon a Town, 2002, etc.) sets out to chat with some ex-presidents of the US, not including Bill Clinton. He reaches four out of five.
The journey started two decades ago with the late Richard Nixon in his California lair. The self-absorbed former chief executive asserted to our reporter that he had never seen himself on TV—thus retaining his famous spontaneity, he claimed. Next, Greene spent time with competent, confident Jimmy Carter, often named “the best ex-president.” Mr. and Mrs. Carter were busy with good works and happy to be at home in Georgia. Affable George Bush the Elder, in Chicago on a speaking gig with son Jeb, revealed that in four years as president he never passed through a hotel lobby; he always entered through the kitchens. Erstwhile Grand Rapids football hero Gerald Ford settled in the California desert and even more affable, was fine company too. Indeed, the author found all his interviewees to be quite agreeable. (Greene missed contact with Ronald Reagan before the late great communicator withdrew into the shadows of Alzheimer’s, and the text was obviously completed before his recent death.) What did these members of a very special fraternity have in common other than affability? Secret Service protection and a certain wistfulness, apparently. In his effort to reveal the inner men, Greene asked such posers as: “Did you always wear your suit jacket in the Oval Office?” “Do your closest friends call you ‘Mr. President’?” “How do you buy your shirts?” and “What’s your favorite song?” The answers range from startled inconsequentiality to surprised irrelevance. And yet, the idea of these apparently ordinary men achieving such an extraordinary height seizes the author’s imagination, and ours too. Only in America, truly, can such a fraternity be interviewed in Greene’s content-free way.
Patriotic musings based on creampuff interviews with some men who were once the most powerful on earth.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-5464-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004
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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