Highlights of the New Jersey Democratic senator and former professional athlete's life, thoughts, and accomplishments. An earlier memoir, Life on the Run (1976), described Bradley's experiences as a Princeton All-American and professional basketball player, and set the stage for his 1978 transition from athletics to the US Senate. This second memoir is a complex interweaving of memories, experiences, legislative accomplishments, and ruminations, leading to another transformation in Bradley's life: his decision not to run for re-election in 1996. This unusual memoir includes statements of policy on such matters as race, economic justice, the environment, campaign financing, tax reform, labor-management relations, and the role of government. Bradley justifies the inclusion of such disparate material by pulling everything into the context of his life: describing, for example, how his experiences playing with black basketball players shaped his commitment to racial equality and how his political principles stem from the sense of ethics and fair play with which he was raised. Bradley goes into almost numbing detail in describing legislation he has sponsored and gives too little space to intense controversies in his career, such as his support for Reagan administration policies in Nicaragua. In addition, cynics might charge that he has laid the groundwork for a future presidential bid by offering platform-like positions on such matters as welfare reform, abortion, and criminal justice, and advocating a ``third way'' that claims to reject the failed policies of both conservatives and liberals. But there are many more reasons to be impressed than critical of this memoir (every word of which Bradley apparently wrote himself). Bradley reveals how a politician operates and that's makes this book interesting. What makes it memorable is the way it reveals how political office can be a constant learning experience for a thoughtful politician. However limited that category of officeholders may be, this memoir proves that it includes Bill Bradley. (First printing of 100,000; Book-of-the-Month Club selection; author tour)
Pub Date: Jan. 24, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-44488-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1995
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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