An enjoyable, tawdry read that covers little new ground.
Compulsively readable account and analysis of President Clinton’s years out of office, perfectly timed for his “First Laddie” campaign.
What does a man do after leading the Free World for eight years? In Clinton’s case, apparently, he makes millions of dollars in speeches, helps eradicate global poverty and childhood obesity and angles to get his wife to succeed him in the White House. Oh, and jet around the world with billionaire playboy Ron Burkle, have alleged affairs with numerous women and derail his wife’s presidential run with excessive self-absorption. The post-presidential Clinton is quite like the Oval Office Clinton, argues Felsenthal (Princess Alice: The Life and Times of Alice Roosevelt Longworth, 2003, etc.): He has considerable gifts but is laid low by his equally large faults. The book is as ambiguous as its subject. Drawing on meticulous research (albeit mostly from press accounts), the author provides great insight into what Clinton the man is actually like, but doesn’t uncover any real news. Filled with salacious details, this a remarkably easy read, though Felsenthal’s sentences are flat. Also…her…use…of…so….many…ellipses is distracting and prompts doubts about whether she is accurately conveying the spirit of what her sources said. Clinton comes across as an immensely compelling figure easily waylaid by glamour and glitz and too self-absorbed to actually ever feel anyone else’s pain. The author compares his post-presidency to those of his good pal George H.W. Bush and Jimmy Carter (specifically Clinton’s pursuit of the Nobel Peace Prize). But Clinton is such a unique figure in American political history—and, if his wife wins the nomination and the election, is destined to become even more unique—that these comparisons ring hollow. Overall, the reader is left with a feeling that the last eight years of his life have been much like the previous eight: great potential easily distracted.
An enjoyable, tawdry read that covers little new ground.Pub Date: May 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-123159-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
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
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