Although drawing on only limited Pakistani sources, Allen nevertheless creates a compelling look at Bhutto’s tumultuous life...
A concise biography of the divisive Pakistani leader.
In this sharp, perceptive contribution to the Icons series, Allen (Chair, English/Bennington Coll.; The Other Side of the Mirror: an American Travels through Syria, 2011, etc.) examines the controversial Benazir Bhutto (1953-2007), who served two nonconsecutive terms as prime minister in the 1980s and 1990s. Although young Nobel Prize winner Malala Yousafzai called Bhutto an inspiration, the woman who emerges here was arrogant, self-serving, and narcissistic (“addicted to adulation”). As she gained power, the author writes, her pretensions became “elevated from the monarchical…to the positively imperial.” By the time she was installed as prime minister for the second time, in 1993, she “simply caved in to the culture of corruption—indeed excelled in it.” She gave her greedy husband multiple government positions, allowing the couple to enrich themselves on an unprecedented scale—the author estimates they gleaned $2 billion to $3 billion in graft. Bhutto’s outsized sense of self-importance had been nurtured by her powerful father, Pakistan’s president and, later, prime minister. He sent his glamorous, indulged, “pampered favorite daughter” to Radcliffe, then Oxford, where he pressed her to hone her talents as a public speaker by standing for election as president of the Oxford Union, a prestigious debating society. Observers of her career remarked that “style tended to trump substance.” She defined leadership as “being charismatic, as pulling together alliances in a personal way,” rather than making and carrying out policy. Allen’s interviews with a few of Bhutto’s American contemporaries give this biography immediacy and candor, and she distills information from published material, such as Bhutto’s own whitewashed autobiography and scholar Stanley Wolpert’s biography of her father. These sources provide ample evidence of American support and manipulation of Pakistan’s “military, authoritarian regime” and “facade of democracy.”
Although drawing on only limited Pakistani sources, Allen nevertheless creates a compelling look at Bhutto’s tumultuous life and Pakistan’s roiling history.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-544-64893-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Amazon/New Harvest
Review Posted Online: Oct. 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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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