If Coolidge were alive, he would see no reason to say this much about himself. Sobel (Dangerous Dreamers, 1993, etc.) is a man on a mission. He considers the conventional wisdom on Calvin Coolidge—that he was a naive simpleton manipulated by political bosses, servant of business and the rich, a do-nothing president whose inactivity set the stage for the Depression—unfair trivialization that reflects the failure of American historians to take Coolidge seriously. His revisionist effort confronts two problems, however. First, Coolidge had his personal papers destroyed, leaving very little documentary basis on which to write a biography. Sobel notes that “Coolidge . . . kept his cards close to his vest, and we know little about what he knew or thought.” Nevertheless, a lack of evidence doesn—t deter Sobel, who relies extensively on the ex-president’s slim autobiography and his own ability to make confident assertions when confronted with matters requiring interpretation. Second, the contemporaneous put-downs of Coolidge are not only much more colorful and memorable than anything that can be extracted from “silent Cal,” they are compelling as well. This imposes a need for heavy mental gymnastics if Sobel is to support his thesis. Consider a statement by Walter Lippmann quoted by Sobel in response to the charge that Coolidge slept away his time in the White House: “Inactivity is a political philosophy and a party program with Mr. Coolidge, and nobody should mistake his unflinching adherence to it for a soft and easy desire to let things slide.” Sobel sidesteps the sarcasm, concluding that “This is quite different from sleeping away five years in office.” Resting one’s case on a distinction between doing nothing for lack of a purpose and doing nothing on purpose illustrates the daunting nature of Sobel’s task, as well as raising concerns about why he is actually pursuing it. Most readers will find it difficult to stifle a yawn.
Pub Date: June 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-89526-410-2
Page Count: 517
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1998
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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