A readable history of a man who tried to do his best, handicapped by the subject's limits and the author's ulterior motives.
In an effort to bring to Grover Cleveland the public acclaim he has not had since the 19th century, popular historian and crime novelist Jeffers (Who Killed Precious?, 1991, etc.) tells the story of this honest, decent, and somewhat boring Chief Executive.
The only US president to serve two non-consecutive terms and to marry during his tenure, Cleveland was known in his day for his forthright honesty and determined integrity. From his stints as veto-happy mayor of Buffalo, corruption-fighting governor of New York, and reform-minded president, Cleveland emerges as an ethical man who followed his convictions despite the corrupt enticements of the Gilded Age. Jeffers's biography moves briskly along, but the occasionally turgid prose creates a few stumbling blocks. Also, it seems at times that the author has not fully assimilated his research: at one point Cleveland's father is described as a “brilliant student” at Yale; later, Jeffers states that the senior Cleveland was considered “studious but not brilliant.” The incessant praise of Cleveland often reaches fulsome levels; Grover is lauded for publicly confessing that he fathered an illegitimate child, yet Jeffers never criticizes his hero for tucking the boy away into an orphanage when his mother was confined to a mental asylum. An Honest President opens and closes with attacks on Bill Clinton for his sexual peccadilloes, and by the end of the biography readers may wonder if the author’s primary objective is to lambaste Clinton by comparing him to this supposedly sterling presidential figure. In the end, Jeffers fails to significantly improve Cleveland's image, because his text adequately reflects an honest yet uninspiring politician.
A readable history of a man who tried to do his best, handicapped by the subject's limits and the author's ulterior motives.Pub Date: July 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-380-97746-X
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2000
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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