An odd but endearing look at a president the nation is finally beginning to understand and appreciate.
A former speechwriter for George H.W. Bush pens a heartfelt appreciation of the president.
The last of the Greatest Generation to occupy the Oval Office, Bush was a genuine war hero, who by 1987 had to contend with “the wimp factor” as he ran for the White House. A Yale-educated East Coast patrician, he was also a Texas oilman who loved country music and pork rinds. Elected to two terms in the House, defeated in a Senate race and in the 1980 presidential primary, he was a politician, yes, but one whose most distinguished service came by appointment: envoy to China, CIA director, U.N. ambassador. His candidacy always posed genuine problems for an American electorate not quite sure what to make of him. Today, he’s our oldest, and polls say our most-respected, living ex-president, a product of an America barely remembered. In this highly impressionistic, idiosyncratic treatment of Bush, Smith (English/Univ. of Rochester; A Talk in the Park: Nine Decades of Baseball Tales from the Broadcast Booth, 2011, etc.) frequently adverts to that bygone era with passages about cultural markers—the Andy Griffith Show, the Pearl Harbor Arizona Memorial, the Polo Grounds—and characters—Bert Parks, Pat Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Glenn Ford, Ted Williams, Yogi Berra—all icons perfectly at home in the pages of the Saturday Evening Post, where the author worked. Smith mixes in a good deal of his own career in journalism, academia and politics, but he devotes the bulk of the narrative to Bush’s presidency and retirement when Smith helped to craft speeches for the oratorically challenged president. Little lyricism is attached to Bush’s rhetoric, but he had what Smith calls a “poetry of the heart.” Up close, the author observed the essential Bush, and in numerous vignettes, he depicts a man of courtesy, sound judgment, uncommon decency, and strict devotion to country, friends and family.
An odd but endearing look at a president the nation is finally beginning to understand and appreciate.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1612346854
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Potomac Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
