A refreshingly unpretentious statement of personal history and political accomplishment that avoids the pitfall of excessive...
The candid account of how the son of a casino owner who consorted with Chicago gangsters found his way into Nevada state politics and into the governor's mansion.
Chicago native Miller was just 10 years old when his illegal bookmaker father got the opportunity to run "a legal (but posh) gambling resort in…Las Vegas." The Sin City of the 1950s bore no resemblance to the sprawling metropolis it would become: "Las Vegas spread out like boiling water on a flat surface, the streets almost swallowed by the desert." Here, Miller's father was able to remake himself into a highly respected casino businessman and pillar of the community. After studying law, a profession his father had once dreamed of pursuing, the author began working in the field of law enforcement. Eventually, he ran for and was elected Clark County district attorney, but not without running into the shadow of his father's colorful past. In an attempt to discredit him, his opponent had suggested that Miller could never be "an impartial county prosecutor if [he] was the son of someone in the gaming business," especially someone who had dealt with former mobsters. This would not be the last time Miller would encounter this kind of prejudice. Throughout the remainder of a political career that would ultimately lead him to the Nevada governor's mansion, Miller successfully staved off attacks against both his character, as well as that of his father. He never apologizes for what his father was, nor does he attempt to play down his father's activities. Rather, Miller celebrates having grown up "the son of a gambling man” and having had the chance to serve a state that gave that gambling man the chance at a better life.
A refreshingly unpretentious statement of personal history and political accomplishment that avoids the pitfall of excessive self-congratulation.Pub Date: March 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-0312591816
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 31, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2013
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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