Wry perspective on the eternal seriousness of casting one’s vote.
This saga of bootstrapping from an impoverished boyhood to the Arkansas governor’s mansion and a distinguished senatorial career could easily serve as a manual for the legislatively inclined.
But it is the author’s total candor, combined with his facility for humor spun out of rural America’s plain talk, that lifts this remembrance well above the ordinary. Bumpers’s prose is not quite as golden as his oratorical reputation might suggest, but it clearly defines and celebrates the influences (primarily his father) and random events (some tragic and touching) that shaped his initial raw ambition for the recognition and power that come with public office and, in time, sparked the political conscience that gives such a life its direction. After a drunk driver killed his parents in 1949, the 24-year-old ex-Marine Bumpers—not a combat veteran, he is careful to stress—finished law school and returned to his East Arkansas hometown of Charleston (pop. 841) to marry, hang out his shingle, and attempt with negligible success to simultaneously carry on his father’s retail hardware business. As a lawyer he was no self-anointed paragon, eagerly glomming onto his opponents’ shadowy courtroom tactics, pragmatically dodging divorce cases where violence-prone ex-husbands posed a tangible threat, but in 18 years of practice he lost only two cases heard by a jury. He was both liberal and influential in persuading racist Charleston to become the first municipality in the former Confederate states to integrate public schools following the 1954 Supreme Court decision mandating it. Bumpers went on to thwart segrationist Orval Faubus’s attempt at a comeback, becoming in 1970 the youngest Arkansas governor ever (age 44) and, two years later, the most bored and frustrated. A surprise win over J. William Fulbright in 1974 sent Bumpers to the US Senate for 24 years; he was called back, ex-officio, to dramatically conclude the defense for longtime friend and colleague Bill Clinton’s 1999 impeachment trial (full text included).
Wry perspective on the eternal seriousness of casting one’s vote.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-50521-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2002
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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