A well-balanced look at a key moment in Reagan’s presidency.
Time deputy managing editor Ratnesar examines the legacy of what is perhaps President Ronald Reagan’s most famous speech.
When Reagan died in 2004, nearly every tribute included the universally known line from his landmark speech at the Berlin Wall on June 12, 1987: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” Reagan’s challenge to the Russian president was soon seen as one of the highlights of his tenure, and even today historians rank it as one of the most powerful lines ever spoken in a presidential speech. In his brief but comprehensive debut, Ratnesar includes testimony from members of Reagan’s former staff, including the speech’s main writer, Peter Robinson. The author capably portrays the nuts-and-bolts process of crafting a presidential speech, with vetting and editing from countless cabinet departments. But Ratnesar widens his scope, effectively placing the speech in the context of the Cold War, showing how Reagan’s predecessors dealt with the Berlin Wall and how Reagan, as far back as 1967, had expressed a firm desire to eliminate it. The author makes a strong case that the words “tear down this wall” were not simply a bellicose challenge; they were an invitation to Gorbachev, an attempt to build a bridge between Cold War enemies. Reagan’s respect for Gorbachev gave the challenge particular resonance. “If he took down that wall,” the president privately told aides, “he’d win the Nobel Prize.” Ratnesar is careful not to freight the speech with too much importance, however. Unlike some of Reagan’s more ardent admirers (and despite the book’s subtitle), the author does not give the speech full credit for the fall of the Berlin Wall, or of the Soviet Union. But there’s no denying its importance. “That single phrase in Berlin,” Ratnesar writes, “seemed to capture the essence of Reagan: a clear, simple, resolute message of optimism” that has since become a key part of Reagan lore.
A well-balanced look at a key moment in Reagan’s presidency.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-5690-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2009
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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