A highly readable battle cry from the moderate center—and timely, given the tenor of politics today.
Senator Specter, swept out of office in 2010, takes a hard look at what happened—and at the collapse, as he sees it, of civil politics.
The cannibals in question are mainstream Republicans—and, to a lesser extent, leftist Democrats who work against moderates on their side of the aisle. By Specter’s (Never Give In: Battling Cancer in the Senate, 2008, etc.) account, “Eating or defeating your own is a form of sophisticated cannibalism.” The Tea Party uprising was a feeding frenzy of ideological purification, as “compromise” became a curse word and anyone who did not toe the party line became an enemy. In that climate, it became impossible, Specter writes, to cross the aisle, both for him as a moderate Republican-turned-Democrat and for his friend Joe Lieberman, who narrowly won a seat as an independent after losing the Democratic primary in Connecticut. Specter writes of the agonizing process that forced him to leave the Republican Party and become, for a short time, a Democrat on Capitol Hill. Interestingly, he also confesses to having crossed the party line years ago to become a Republican in the first place, having once been a Democrat early in his political career. The author sees much to lament in the loss of collegiality and the hardening of ideological lines in the modern Congress, especially because Congress has its work cut out for it in curbing the excesses of an activist Supreme Court that is busily awarding personhood to corporations and otherwise corrupting the political process. Specter closes on a note of hopefulness that centers on the victory of Lisa Murkowski over Tea Party intransigence in Alaska, though he also warns that “political extremism…poses a new, or amplified, threat to the United States”—and he doesn’t just mean al-Qaeda.
A highly readable battle cry from the moderate center—and timely, given the tenor of politics today.Pub Date: April 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-250-00368-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2012
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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