Refreshingly candid about his vindictive motives, Raymond offers a damning chronicle of political hubris.
One of the Northeast GOP’s top campaigners tells how he became an agent of corruption for the Republican revolution.
Raymond’s great-grandfather, John Thomas Underwood, founded the famous typewriter company, and while the author’s share of that fortune ensured that he’d never go hungry, “family pride—hell, my own pride—ensured that I’d never be some yacht-hopping scion.” After graduating from college in 1989 and spending a few desultory years in PR, he wandered into the Graduate School of Political Management. Based at the time in New York City, GSPM pushed a militaristic, Machiavellian approach to the business that was seductive to a drifter like Raymond: “I wanted to pick a fight, have a fight, and win a fight.” For little apparent ideological reason, he went to work for the Republicans in New Jersey; later he ran a doomed campaign for a pro-choice GOP Philadelphia socialite with more friends than smarts. Raymond climbed the party ladder during the heady post-Gingrich days, when the very thought of compromise could infuriate the new South-centric Republican leadership, whose campaign rhetoric he derides as “pro-life, snake-handling babble.” It’s surprising at first to hear such criticisms from a highly placed operative in the Republican National Committee, but it becomes markedly less so once Raymond gets to the crux of the matter: how he was hung out to dry and went to jail for following orders to jam Democratic volunteers’ phone lines. As he states early on, “In GOP circles in 2002 it seemed preposterous that anything you did to win an election could be considered a crime.” He saw the light in prison and decided to tell the American voters about the dirty tricks he practiced, which he sees growing ever more common. “Now what are you going to do about it?” he asks.
Refreshingly candid about his vindictive motives, Raymond offers a damning chronicle of political hubris.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4165-5222-2
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2008
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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