Neatly structured and highly readable debut featuring a commanding central figure.
A well-paced, exhaustively researched biography of Robert Strauss, the well-connected lawyer, politician, businessman and diplomat known in some circles as “Mr. Democrat.”
Readers interested in national politics will find McGarr's first book packed with compelling stories about her subject's varied and intriguing career, the evolution of the Democratic Party from the 1950s to the ’90s and the changing tone in Washington during the same period. A wealthy and successful Texas lawyer who began his career as an FBI agent, Strauss established himself as an important figure in state politics by the ’50s, served as Chairman of the Democratic National Committee from 1972 to 1977, U.S. Trade Representative and special envoy to the Middle East under President Carter and U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union and, later, Russia under President George H.W. Bush. By disclosing her close personal connection to her subject in the book's introduction—Strauss is McGarr's great-uncle—the author is clearly attempting to de-fang potential critics. McGarr likely learned this handy trick from “Uncle Bob” himself. As she frequently notes, despite having come under occasional fire for influence-peddling throughout his years in politics, Strauss' disarmingly frank manner kept his reputation virtually unsullied. Though ingratiating, McGarr's candor about her relationship to her subject nevertheless casts doubt on her portrayal of a man toward whom she clearly feels deep affection and loyalty. Her exclusive access to Strauss himself—as well as to dozens of high-level politicians and media personalities who worked with him—both strengthens the book and undermines it. Though enriched by many funny, revealing quotes and anecdotes, the book draws heavily on material almost exclusively provided by people who like and admire the subject. By all accounts, including McGarr's, Strauss has a Texas-sized personality and an ego to match. Many of his business dealings were ethical only in the sense that he never believed he was doing anything wrong. McGarr seems at pains to argue that, even if Strauss' actions weren't always strictly above-board, his intentions were. It is worth reading the book to decide whether Strauss is a wise elder statesman of a bygone era or merely an effective practitioner of politics as usual.
Neatly structured and highly readable debut featuring a commanding central figure.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-58648-877-2
Page Count: 480
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
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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