A well-delineated portrait of an impassioned conservative.
An admiring look at the career of William F. Buckley Jr. (1925-2008), public contrarian.
Presidential historian Felzenberg (Annenberg School for Communication, Univ. of Pennsylvania; The Leaders We Deserved (and a Few We Didn’t): Rethinking the Presidential Rating Game, 2008, etc.) praises the “elegance, humor, wit, and grace” that Buckley brought to his many roles as “writer and editor, debater, publicist, organizer, political candidate, activist, and networker extraordinaire.” From his student days at Yale until his death, Buckley publicized and honed an unwavering conservative ideology, which Felzenberg asserts offered “a respectable alternative” to the nation’s pervasive “liberal orthodoxy.” Arguing that Buckley was hugely influential, the author more convincingly portrays him as an audacious gadfly and provocateur. The sixth of 10 children, he learned early how to speak his mind and garner the attention he coveted. Even as a schoolboy, Buckley “was judgmental about others and was anything but shy about voicing disapproval of people and views he disliked.” That behavior persisted throughout his life, as he attacked communism, atheism, and liberal values. He supported Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist campaign, and he was “strident in his criticism of Dwight D. Eisenhower” as well as his successors, with the notable exception of Ronald Reagan. Until late in his life, he vehemently opposed efforts to protect the civil rights of African-Americans. Whites, he insisted, were “the more advanced race” and therefore “entitled to govern.” An ardent Catholic, he condemned homosexuality. Besides a prolific output of books, Buckley founded and edited the National Review, a magazine, Felzenberg writes, with only “minimal” influence on national policy. TV appearances showcased Buckley’s “quick wit, magnetic personality, and well-developed media savvy,” turning him into a celebrity. His notoriety expanded in 1966, when he launched Firing Line, a TV program featuring feisty verbal combat. The author does not consider Buckley as a brother, father, and husband (his wife, “his best friend” and supporter, is hardly mentioned), focusing instead on his relationships with politicians.
A well-delineated portrait of an impassioned conservative.Pub Date: May 2, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-300-16384-1
Page Count: 456
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
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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