Certain to appeal to Clinton devotees, especially in light of the possibility of still further Bill Clinton endeavors as...
The post-presidential life of Bill Clinton.
In this admiring account, veteran journalist and National Memo editor-in-chief Conason (It Can Happen Here: Authoritarian Peril in the Age of Bush, 2007, etc.) traces the former president’s career from his 2001 departure from the White House—when he was $11 million in debt, vilified by “habitual haters,” and seeking some purpose—to his present role as head of the Clinton Global Initiative, with a “sterling international image” as perhaps “the most popular man in the world.” Written with the cooperation of Clinton and his staff, the author’s often absorbing chronicle captures the energy and charisma of the former president as he turns to the admiring global community, launching a “frantic, peripatetic career as the world’s best-paid public speaker” and finding a mission in his philanthropic work in Africa, Asia, and elsewhere. While badly bloated with needless details on travels, the sniping of enemies, and ceaseless card games, the book offers sharp insights into the roles of loyal aids, most notably Ira Magaziner, as well as family members in supporting Clinton’s initiatives to fight AIDS and other diseases and to rebuild communities around the world. Inspired by a desire to create a substantive alternative to the World Economic Forum, the CGI has become a powerful model for entrepreneurial cooperation in world affairs. The author offers many telling details: how he learned from Nelson Mandela to view with compassion those who had wronged him; how he bonded with George H.W. Bush in disaster relief efforts and clashed with presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama; and his advising of British Prime Minister Tony Blair at the onset of the Iraq War. Conason also tells the stories of the creation of the Clinton library in Little Rock and the making of the ex-president’s memoir, My Life.
Certain to appeal to Clinton devotees, especially in light of the possibility of still further Bill Clinton endeavors as first gentleman.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4391-5410-6
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2016
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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