An illuminating glimpse behind the scenes, though fans and detractors alike will find much room for debate.
A fresh look at the political rise and fortunes of the Clintons, a saga conditioned, writes Chafe (History/Duke Univ.; The Rise and Fall of the American Century, 2009, etc.), by the best and worst in their natures.
“Bill Clinton…is the first politician in history who has perfected the ability to cry in just one eye,” remarked Republican political operative and longtime foe—but now, oddly, friend—Haley Barbour, not unappreciatively. Clinton, as Chafe tells it, mastered the psychological survival skills necessary of a child of an abusive, alcoholic parent. Neglected and tormented as a child, he was also raised by a doting grandmother to be a force of destiny, literate by the age of three and a ham and class-time monopolizer by the time he was in elementary school. Clinton’s eagerness to please and be adored, oddly mirrored in the current president, played out politically in many episodes. One of the key moments in his early political career was being turned out of the governor’s office in Arkansas, which bewildered and depressed him, but which came as no surprise to anyone who shared the widespread view that he was “of an intent to impose ideas on Arkansas’s citizens whether they were ready for them or not.” Another key moment was the defeat of the omnibus health care act while Clinton was serving his first term as president; he had labored under the view that he could charm the opposition away, while Hillary rejected any suggestion of altering her carefully crafted bill. “The personal dynamic between Bill and Hillary helps explain why repeated possibilities for compromise were persistently rebuffed,” writes the author. Psychobiography is always suspect, particularly in the hands of someone who doesn’t possess a degree in psychiatry, but Chafe is careful to back up his suppositions with good evidence, and the portrait that emerges is both believable and of consummate interest to political junkies.
An illuminating glimpse behind the scenes, though fans and detractors alike will find much room for debate.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-8090-9465-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2012
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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