An interesting study filled with useful historical context.
A British historian fascinated with the American South examines the changes in the region through the political career of Albert Gore Sr. (1907-1998).
Badger (American History/Northumbria Univ.; FDR: The First Hundred Days, 2008, etc.) offers a great deal of information about the U.S. senator from Tennessee—and father of former vice president Al Gore Jr.—but this book is not primarily a biography. Understanding what the author hopes to accomplish requires understanding that the book is part of the publisher’s series called Politics and Culture in Modern America. The mission statement of that series includes the desire to “reverse the fragmentation of modern U.S. history” regarding a variety of issues, including the role of government; racial, gender, and labor controversies; and widespread social movements. In that context, Badger succeeds admirably. As a Tennessee House member and then senator, Gore sought to modernize the Deep South by building interstate highways, encouraging the use of higher-tech agricultural equipment and strategies, and supporting the Tennessee Valley Authority’s distribution of electricity. Regarding racial segregation, Gore represented progress, albeit uncomfortable and slow progress. Knowing the nation needed the participation of black voters, Gore advocated from a distance while hoping to retain the votes of avid segregationists throughout Tennessee. On other matters, he openly defied constituents by opposing American involvement in the Vietnam War and insisting on the constitutional separation of church and state. Gore also demonstrated political courage by sometimes opposing the policies of fellow Southerner and Senate colleague Lyndon Johnson, especially after Johnson became president. Gore’s refusal to surrender his semi-maverick status led to his defeat in 1970 to a Republican candidate who supported a return to open segregation. In an epilogue, Badger comments on Gore’s post-Senate career in multinational business and law practice as well as his work campaigning for his son.
An interesting study filled with useful historical context.Pub Date: Dec. 18, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8122-5072-5
Page Count: 376
Publisher: Univ. of Pennsylvania
Review Posted Online: Sept. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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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