Well-balanced, though not likely to sway either detractors or admirers one way or another. We look forward to the planned...
The authorized, remarkably evenhanded biography of the grimly divisive, late Iron Lady of Britain.
Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013), by Fleet Street journalist and debut author Moore’s account, was not one for the examined life. Like her friend Ronald Reagan, she acted and then moved on, stopping only for an occasional moment of self-criticism for, say, not having been better prepared for a Parliamentary question-and-answer session. And act she did, introducing schemes of privatization and austerity, busting unions, giving aid and comfort to white apartheid regimes in southern Africa—though, Moore hastens to note, her written reference to a “nigger brown” frock was just a garden-variety expression of the time. One feels for the author, given his subject’s lack of self-reflection and paucity of written records, for Thatcher was no writer save for heavily underlined, exclamatory do-this and do-that directives on pieces of paper handed to her. Nonetheless, Moore acquits himself well in this respectful but certainly not hagiographic account. If it’s not entirely warts-and-all, it reckons with some of the darker aspects of her time in power, including her habit of conducting periodic purges to weed out the ideologically suspect within her ranks, as well as some poor and even possibly criminal decisions, such as the sinking of the Argentine ship Belgrano in the early days of the Falklands War. That Thatcher enjoyed far from universal popular support was clear in the aftermath of her recent death, but Moore is correct to note that the relentlessly self-made, all-controlling leader enjoyed a great boost thanks to the Falklands War, which “established [her] personal mastery of the political scene, and convinced people of her special gifts of leadership.”
Well-balanced, though not likely to sway either detractors or admirers one way or another. We look forward to the planned sequel, covering the years of Thatcher’s political decline.Pub Date: May 21, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-307-95894-5
Page Count: 912
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2013
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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