If Clinton wins the White House, he should consider choosing as his press secretary either author of this subtle panegyric. ``This biography,'' write Allen and Portis, ``is a thorough examination of a man who dreamed of being president...from his earliest days.'' Thorough, perhaps, but also delicately biased. Portis (a former editor of the Arkansas Gazette—``whose editorial page,'' the authors note, ``had been a constant Clinton supporter through the years'') and Allen (who began the book as a graduate project at the Univ. of Mississippi) give the lion's share of quotations to Clinton-admirers: ``Bill Clinton was very enthusiastic and a very dedicated professor,'' says a former student of the governor in a typical statement. And, at times, the authors gloss over damning facts (e.g., a clear Clinton lie regarding a question about his college-drug use becomes a statement that's ``not entirely true''). But Allen and Portis are frank about their subject's titanic ambition and do an adequate job of tracing the candidate's earlier years (scarred by tragedy: his father died before Clinton was born; his stepfather died when Clinton was 21; and, in 1984, Clinton's younger brother went to prison for cocaine distribution). Of most interest are the in-depth coverage of Clinton's years as governor, which convincingly portrays Clinton as a man passionate about reform, particularly in education; and the concluding chapter, which—while swiping at Ross Perot (``wild promises'') and proclaiming that Clinton will defeat Bush ``if the campaign becomes one of ideas and issues'' instead of ``personal attacks''—urges Clinton to give up his overriding fear of losing and to take the risk of stating ``hard truths'' in the upcoming campaign. By no means a definitive biography, but not flack-fluff either; and, for all its slant, the most informative text available on the man who would be President. (Sixteen pages of photographs- -not seen.)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1992
ISBN: 1-55972-154-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Birch Lane Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1992
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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