The narrative is filled with gems if readers are willing to struggle through the disorganization.
The noted American Urban Radio Networks White House Correspondent and CNN analyst focuses on her experiences as a black woman reporter trying to do her job amid the hostile first year of the Trump presidency.
Before Trump entered office, Ryan (At Mama's Knee: Mothers and Race in Black and White, 2016, etc.) covered Republican and Democratic administrations without achieving widespread recognition, reporting mostly for AURN since the late 1990s. Her recognition factor shot up significantly in 2017 due to the combative rhetoric aimed at the author by Trump, his White House press secretaries, and White House staffers, most notably Omarosa Manigault-Newman. After Ryan asked Trump openly about his racism, she became a hero to many citizens (in 2017, she was named Journalist of the Year by the National Association of Black Journalist) and a pariah to others (she has received many death threats from Trump supporters). Regarding her seemingly overnight fame, the author notes that she has conducted herself in the same journalistic manner for two decades but that in an era of “fake news” and “alternative facts,” ideologues think of her as somehow biased against Trump and Republicans. The writing is mostly clear but is slowed by clichéd language—e.g., “throw in the towel.” Each chapter is worthy on its own, yet they are arranged in a puzzling manner. A chapter about health care policy precedes a chapter about Ryan unwillingly becoming the story instead of staying out of the spotlight, and policy-heavy chapters about immigration policy, indifference to historically black colleges, and women in the workplace materialize out of nowhere. Throughout the book, the author clarifies her viewpoint (shared by many) that she respects the office of the presidency but finds Trump and many of his staff members incompetent at best and often mean in petty ways.
The narrative is filled with gems if readers are willing to struggle through the disorganization.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5381-1336-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 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
SEEN & HEARD
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