Washington's most eminent lawyer, adviser, and confidant of Presidents offers a brilliant, entertaining, and generous (736- page) memoir of life at the pinnacle of power. Clifford began life as an attorney in Missouri, becoming during WW II the naval aide to President Truman. Quickly, he assumed a dominant role in the Truman White House and became Truman's principal adviser on domestic and foreign policy. Here, his admiration for Truman is obvious, and his many anecdotes about his plain-spoken chief are delightful. Moreover, Clifford became primary architect of many of Truman's most splendid accomplishmentshis triumphs over the steel and coal unions, the National Security Act, the desegregation of the Armed Forces, and Truman's magnificent 1948 electoral victory of Dewey. Soon after that victory, Clifford retired to become a private lawyer in Washington. He remained influential with many prominent people in government, however, and his narrative of Washington in the Fifties is fascinating. A self-proclaimed ``liberal activist,'' he later had a powerful impact on the policies of the Kennedy Administration. Similarly, he became personally involved with the formation of policy in the Johnson Administration. Despite early opposition to the Vietnam War, Clifford publicly supported the President's policies, eventually becoming LBJ's secretary of defense. His excruciating narrative of the Vietnam tragedy fills the reader with regret that LBJ did not follow Clifford's wise counsel. Finally, Clifford briefly reviews the achievements and shortcomings of Presidents in the post-Johnson era. His analysis of Richard Nixon's downfall and of the very dissimilar imperfections of Jimmy Carter's leadership are particularly illuminating. A splendidly writtenwith the help of Holbrooke, a managing director at Lehman Brothershighly engrossing narrative of postwar Washington, told by one of the last of America's Wise Men. (Sixteen pages of b&w photosnot seen.) (Book-of-the-Month Club Dual Selection for August)
Pub Date: May 31, 1991
ISBN: 0-394-56995-4
Page Count: 736
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1991
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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