For good and ill—and, at times, to her husband’s chagrin—Nellie Taft was far from the standard-issue first lady. Anthony...
“Unconventional” is right: a pleasing biography of a beer-drinking, card-playing, cigarette-smoking presidential wife who insisted on a place at the political table, paving the way for successors such as Eleanor Roosevelt and Hillary Clinton.
Nellie Taft, writes presidential historian/biographer Anthony (The Kennedy White House, 2001, etc.), the wife of Republican stalwart William Howard Taft, initially exercised political power as first among equals in her Cincinnati crowd. She would always be a Cincinnati chauvinist, reminding audiences that Chicago was poorer and Cleveland not worth mentioning; yet she hungered to get out and see the world, and when it appeared that her husband was happy where he was, she pushed him to run for successively more important public offices, finally the presidency. (She also, Anthony suggests, had more than a little to do with keeping the rivalry between Taft and his predecessor and onetime friend Teddy Roosevelt alive: see Patricia O’Toole’s recent When Trumpets Call , p. 39.) Less reform-minded than Roosevelt and perceived by big business as a “sugarplum president,” Taft muddled along, his wife steadily urging him on, but she seems to have opposed the one job he really wanted: Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. She was also quite explicit in using the bully pulpit to advance women’s rights and other progressive issues; indeed, Anthony characterizes both Tafts as proponents of a “version of conservative progressivism” that had sharper teeth than today’s so-called compassionate conservatism. Nellie was personally liberal, which gave the scolds and moralists of her day plenty to cluck about; she also, though, held the usual class prejudices of her time, including old-school anti-Semitism (in Vienna in 1930, she complained that “generally the Jews here are awful, so objectionable”) and strong support for the Emperor of Japan, even as she suspected that Japan would soon go to war with the United States.
For good and ill—and, at times, to her husband’s chagrin—Nellie Taft was far from the standard-issue first lady. Anthony paints a vivid portrait.Pub Date: April 12, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-051382-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 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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