Though necessarily biased, this is a highly thoughtful, thorough exploration of the grindingly slow workings of national...
A member of the Barack Obama administration reviews his eight years with the president with a mixture of pride and regret.
Rhodes, whose official title was Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communication, was 29 and working at a Washington, D.C., think tank when he joined Obama's campaign team and then his administration. During that time, he was with Obama almost daily and wrote numerous speeches for the president, including the Nobel Peace Prize speech in which Obama spoke of the gap between “the world as it is” and “the world as it ought to be.” It's the former that takes center stage here, as Rhodes, in brief but information-packed chapters, describes the ways in which idealism—his more than the pragmatic president's—is ground down by the reality of deeply stubborn governments and institutions. Moving chronologically through Obama's two terms, the author clearly describes the president's responses to crises around the world, including those in Egypt, Syria, and Libya, and his own role in shaping Obama's response to a host of critical issues. Frustrated with playing only the role of mouthpiece, Rhodes began to take a larger role in shaping the relationships between the United States and nations like Cuba and Burma as the years went on, while still “wrestl[ing] with the concern that I was losing myself inside the experience, transformed into a cipher for the needs of this other person, who was, after all, a politician, playing the role of U.S. President.” Though he reveals a few details about Obama, including his affection for Nicorette gum and Scrabble and his occasional indulgence in anger directed at those working most closely with him, this is no tell-all. The narrative is a serious, even somber, inside look at the forces at work inside—and outside—a presidency.
Though necessarily biased, this is a highly thoughtful, thorough exploration of the grindingly slow workings of national security and the inevitable compromises of government.Pub Date: June 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-50935-6
Page Count: 484
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: June 25, 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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