Good-natured, self-serving, with useful lessons for budding officeholders (hint: let someone powerful introduce you to your...
“I love campaigning, honing the message and delivering it to the voters”: a political memoir of the sort that usually precedes a bid for the presidency—a possibility the present New Mexico governor surely keeps close to his heart.
Richardson is a new, and very well situated, kind of politico: bilingual and bicultural in a nation increasingly both those things, born to a Mexican mother and Anglo father, long resident in Mexico but with an East Coast education, a boomer who didn’t partake, let alone inhale, and who missed out on Vietnam but would have gone if asked. He is also a bold and very shrewd practical politician who isn’t bashful about unveiling an ultraliberal pedigree. It was Hubert Humphrey who sent him off to New Mexico to bag his first elected office; Bill Clinton who appointed him ambassador to the UN (during which service, among other things, Richardson won a surprising concession from none other than Saddam Hussein); and Al Gore who made noise about sharing the ticket with Richardson in 2004. That pedigree, proudly worn, will likely not earn Richardson points among wealthy, right-leaning Texans, but there’s enough pointed politicking in these pages to launch a write-in campaign right now, as Richardson pushes for the preservation of wild places here, talks tough on crime and international outlawry there, faintly praises the sitting president (“Kerry ran a good race. Bush ran a better one; people just liked the guy”) and gets in a few digs at members of his own party.
Good-natured, self-serving, with useful lessons for budding officeholders (hint: let someone powerful introduce you to your first big crowd). We’ll be hearing more from this author.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2005
ISBN: 0-399-15324-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2005
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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