Block—a.k.a. ``Herblock''—is a national institution. His drawings—appearing in The Washington Post since 1945—have been cited as factors in the discrediting of McCarthyism (a word he invented), the promotion of racial equality, the warning against nuclear war, and the toppling of Nixon. Here, in a lively memoir, Block rehashes many of his battles against abuses of power and the public trust; especially interesting are his assessments of the Presidents he's caricatured during his seven decades of political commentary. Block rarely second-guesses his earlier opinions, even on Eisenhower, whose posthumous reputation he attributes largely to our forgetting Ike's inaction on civil rights and his pandering to McCarthyism. The author is more charitable to JFK and LBJ, without airbrushing their political and personal flaws. But he reserves his full contempt for Nixon and Bush, whom he portrays as unprincipled opportunists interested only in winning and in helping themselves to the spoils. Sprinkled among the professional memories are anecdotes of Block's early days in Chicago, his army stint, his heart attack, his unsuccessful attempt to learn to swim, and his rubbing elbows with a fair number of the famous, in and out of politics. While Block the cartoonist has always been in the thick of things, his off-duty persona seems to have lived a comparatively placid life. And except for a few scattered comments on the tools and techniques of his trade, he has disappointingly little to say here about the art of cartooning itself (although his comments on a number of his fellow cartoonists are illuminating). Outspoken, unashamedly liberal, and thoroughly readable. (Enriched by 200 vintage Herblock cartoons, plus an eight-page photo insert—not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 18, 1993
ISBN: 0-02-511895-1
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1993
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
SEEN & HEARD
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