Though well-documented and richly detailed, this book is unlikely to captivate readers who do not have a special interest in...
An informative and intermittently engaging account of Justice Stevens' tenure on the Supreme Court.
Stevens, who joined the Court in 1975 and retired in 2010, at the age of 90, was the third-longest-serving justice in the Court's history and its oldest member at the time of his retirement. He served under five Chief Justices, beginning with Fred Vinson and ending with John Roberts Jr.; the book is divided into sections that detail his recollections of the Court under each Chief. For the most part neatly structured and concise, the book's clarity is occasionally compromised by gratuitous legalese. It's not always clear how or why he has chosen to share a certain memory or observation or describe the ruling in a particular case. At times he veers into meandering personal anecdote, waxing rhapsodic about the warm handshakes he shared with his fellow justices, their morning coffee breaks, lavish holiday parties and “Nino” Scalia's “wonderfully spontaneous sense of humor.” It is touchingly clear that Stevens loved his time as a member of the Court, but only the most dedicated Supreme Court aficionado is likely to care about the metal spittoons next to each justice's chair or the toggle switch they use to turn on their microphones. Stevens' memory is sharp, his tone is affable and his storytelling has charming folksy quality, but as a whole this memoir is reminiscent of an exceptionally long-winded speech given by the guest of honor at a retirement party.
Though well-documented and richly detailed, this book is unlikely to captivate readers who do not have a special interest in the Supreme Court.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-316-19980-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2011
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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