Into the Kennedy aura once more, but brightly.
A gallimaufry of musings on the Kennedy family showcases some classy political writing.
Willis (Mob, p. 1475, etc.) pulls together 21 articles and book excerpts to form a collection centered on Jack, Bobby, and Ted. The aim is to provide revealing glimpses into a family that has struck a deep chord in American life, and although the insights don't necessarily hold any water, much of the writing here is superb. “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” Norman Mailer’s acid deflation of the 1960 Democratic Convention in Los Angeles, reminds us that when it came to political reporting, he could out-Wolfe and out-Thompson them all. An excerpt from Richard Reeves's President Kennedy chillingly recalls the bad advice JFK took from Maxwell Taylor and Walt Rostow concerning Vietnam, and the good advice he ignored from the likes of George Ball. In a portion of The Dark Side of Camelot, Seymour Hersh contributes an uncharacteristically sensitive look at the role JFK’s father played in shaping his personality. There are a couple of gripping airplane disaster stories (Kathleen's death, Ted's near-miss) and a brooding piece from Jack Newfield’s Robert Kennedy: A Memoir about the changes Bobby underwent as his political education transformed him from intolerant authoritarian to a man who identified with all of life's losers. There are also a couple of unexpected pieces: a portrait of the pitiful Marina Oswald from Norman Mailer’s Oswald’s Tale and “The Exner File,” historian Michael O'Brien’s examination of Jack's mob connections as mediated through girlfriend Judith Exner. “The Holy Family,” Gore Vidal's 1967 essay on the fraudulence of the Kennedy mystique, shows Jack outmaneuvered by Khrushchev and made to look ludicrous by the Bay of Pigs fiasco, trumped on all his social legislation by a truculent congress. But if there was one thing the Kennedys excelled at, it was projecting an image; they continue to cast it long after death.
Into the Kennedy aura once more, but brightly.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-56025-333-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2001
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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