An unrelenting critique of the bogeyman of liberals who refuses to go away.
The longtime critic of the Bush family levels his guns at today’s most notorious political consultant.
Just in time for the 2012 election, along comes Vanity Fair contributing editor Unger (The Fall of the House of Bush: The Untold Story of How a Band of True Believers Seized the Executive Branch, Started the Iraq War, and Still Imperils America Today, 2007, etc.) to remind liberals that Karl Rove did not depart the scene with his patron, the reviled W. The “Evil Genius” has been very busy attending to his long-term project of capturing all three branches of government for the Republican Party. From prestigious perches at Fox News, the Wall Street Journal and Newsweek, Rove has been preparing the public battle space for the coming election. Behind the scenes, contemptuous of the amateurish tea party and circumventing the ossified GOP apparatus, he’s strung together his own SuperPAC network. He has taken full advantage of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, and he’s seeded the Romney campaign with any number of close associates and acolytes. If Romney prevails with the help of Rove’s hidden hand, Unger insists, the consequences for the nation promise to be “monumental,” none of them good. To support his ominous prediction, he marches through Rove’s career scandals, none of which bear the hard-nosed operative’s fingerprints—he’s too smart for that—but they all reek of the master manipulator’s sulphurous odor. Unger discusses Rove’s role in the outing of Valerie Plame, his effort to manipulate Ohio’s 2004 election results and his use of the criminal justice system to target political opponents, along with his part in the Swift Boat ads that drowned John Kerry and his orchestration of the takedown that ended Dan Rather’s career. For the conscienceless Rove, issues—tort reform, voter fraud—matter only insofar as they advance the Republican cause. But, then, power has always been his objective, a 30-year effort “to game the American electoral system by whatever means necessary.”
An unrelenting critique of the bogeyman of liberals who refuses to go away.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-9493-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2012
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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