A reasonably serious biography, by a reporter in Time magazine’s Washington bureau. Blackman, a seasoned journalist, focuses on the personal life of a public figure. Readers seeking analysis of Albright’s foreign policy, insights into how her mind works, or an agenda she might pursue through higher elective office will need to look elsewhere. Even political relations are characterized in terms of style rather than substance. Her interactions with the president, for example, are described as “almost flirtatious,” while any shared foreign policy goals beyond vague platitudes remain undiscussed. That said, this is a balanced, penetrating look at Albright as a person. Blackman acknowledges Albright’s considerable accomplishments without making her into a saint, exposing qualities that have helped her succeed but are not always positive. In Blackman’s hands, Albright appears driven and shrewd, talented and caring about others, and above all an expert networker at home in the image-conscious late 20th century. She has “great confidence” but also “abiding insecurities” requiring “constant reassurance” from friends, and is “more obsessed with her image than almost anyone on the public stage today.” Deeply shaken by her divorce, she turned to friends for comfort so excessively that they eventually told her “to shut up about Joe, to get on with her life.” This experience also suggests an Albright pattern of behavior: how could she have been married for 23 years and have no inkling that her spouse was about to leave, just as she apparently was ignorant of her Jewish heritage until a reporter uncovered it? The latter incident is thoroughly beaten to death by Blackman, who also devotes a full third of the book to the life of Albright’s father. This discussion of her family background is interesting on its own terms, but disproportionate if the goal is to understand the secretary of state. The first Albright biography worth reading, but not destined to be the definitive account of a political career. (Author tour; radio satellite tour)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-684-84564-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998
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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