A self-aggrandizing, self-righteous attempt by the blustery New York senator to explain his vision of the American political sceneat least as it applies to the life and times of Senator Alfonse D'Amato. The world according to New York's Republican senator is very simple. Just about every political move that D'Amato makes is correct. Just about every political move that his opponents make is incorrect. Virtually every politician who has run against him, D'Amato says, is wrong on nearly all the issues. Virtually all of his political opponentsincluding the late New York Republican senator Jacob Javits, former Democratic representative Elizabeth Holtzman, former Ralph Nader associate Mark Green, and former New York State attorney general Robert Abramsran unfair, viciously deceitful campaigns against him. D'Amato's black-and-white world also includes an enemies list made up primarily of the ``liberal establishment'' (also known as ``self-righteous liberal do- gooders'') along with the ``liberal press'' (also called ``the establishment press''). In the world according to Alfonse, the senator is always right; the press is disingenuous at best, dishonest at worst. The senator's press enemies list is topped by D'Amato's hometown newspaper, Newsday. That newspaper's coverage of his 1992 senatorial campaign, the senator says, was ``blatantly biased and hostile.'' D'Amato also has harshly critical things to say about Newsweek, the New York Timeswhich, he claims, ``goes to all sorts of lengths to appear sensitive to every `politically correct' group or lifestyle''the Village Voice, and CBS's Sixty Minutes. D'Amato credits Kevin McDonough with helping him ``compile'' his book. The senator, however, takes full author credit. That might explain why the writing is artless at best, mired in clichÇs, filled with amateurish exclamation points, and marred by several grammatical errors. For dyed-in-the-wool conservative Republican fans of Senator Alfonse D'Amato only. (16 pages photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Aug. 18, 1995
ISBN: 0-7868-6045-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1995
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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