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CHURCHILL

WALKING WITH DESTINY

The most comprehensive single-volume biography of Churchill that we have in print and a boon for any student of the...

Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2018


  • New York Times Bestseller

Sprawling life of the great British leader, drawing on previously unavailable documents, including notes of wartime counsels kept by King George VI.

No stranger to big biographies or larger-than-life subjects, historian and commentator Roberts (Napoleon: A Life, 2014, etc.) faces a special challenge with Winston Churchill (1874-1965), who closely documented himself and still has managed to inspire a roomful of books. Roberts adds materially to the library by consulting troves of documents unknown or not open to other researchers. He also has a sense of both drama and character as well as the context of Churchill’s time. As the author writes early on, Churchill “was born into a caste that held immense political and economic power in the largest empire in world history, and that had not yet become plagued by insecurity and self-doubt.” Sometimes Churchill’s overconfidence led to disaster, as at Gallipoli; other times it helped his nation steel itself for war, as with his “fight them on the beaches” speech at the dawn of World War II. Roberts turns up fascinating fragments, including solid evidence that Churchill was not always the pro-American some biographers have claimed him to be: “You have to try and understand and master America and make her like you,” counseled his wife, Clementine. Better still, the narrative underscores Churchill’s attention to the smallest details while seeing the big picture of global strategy in matters such as handling an always-fraught alliance with the Soviet Union against Hitler and laying the groundwork for a postwar world with plenty of tensions of its own, including the question of a Jewish state in Palestine. Roberts’ portrait comes warts and all, allowing, for instance, that the leader who decried Nazi air attacks on London would order the leveling by bombing of whole German cities. The author delivers a clear, well-limned view of a complex figure who, in no danger of being forgotten, continues to inspire.

The most comprehensive single-volume biography of Churchill that we have in print and a boon for any student of the statesman and his times.

Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-101-98099-6

Page Count: 1088

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: Sept. 11, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2018

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

Well-told and admonitory.

Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

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INTO THE WILD

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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)

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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