Admirers of Warren will find this a welcome exaltation.
“She works on the inside, but she’s never considered herself an insider.” A celebratory biography of the “brand-name populist” who many commentators expect will run for president in 2020.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, writes Felix (Michelle Obama: A Photographic Journey, 2017, etc.), comes by her advocacy for the struggling middle class honestly. Born in Oklahoma, she grew up in a household run by parents who, though they considered themselves middle-class, were just a couple of paychecks away from financial disaster—as happened from time to time. Confronting those realities as a lawyer with substantial training in economics and as a public intellectual committed to conveying her findings so that readers everywhere could understand them, Warren has emerged as a leader of the left wing of the Democratic Party, as well as a senator from Massachusetts, a long journey from her beginnings as a middle-state conservative. Felix writes uncritically and sometimes breezily, addressing her subject as a familiar: “It’s a leap of faith to turn away from the sheltering walls of a university, and Elizabeth thought long and hard before jumping into the political chaos of the Bankruptcy Review Commission.” The book is best understood as a fan’s notes, though the author does a good job of digging evenhandedly into one of the central controversies surrounding Warren, the claim of Native American ancestry that has provided Donald Trump with the ugly slur “Pocahontas.” That controversy well merits the several pages Felix devotes to it, which, as she notes, could not be explained in a media atmosphere “in the business of sound-bite drama, not social analysis.” One can be sure that in the event that Warren declares for the presidency, the matter will be reignited, even as she has moved on to being a persistent—and persisting—critic of the rule of big money in electoral politics.
Admirers of Warren will find this a welcome exaltation.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4926-6528-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
