A book that will appeal to readers convinced that Benghazi and Hillary Clinton’s email habits are the most pressing concerns...
A conservative polemic against “big government” disguised as a memoir of government service.
After serving in the Secret Service for more than 10 years, Bongino (Life Inside the Bubble: Why a Top Ranked Secret Service Agent Walked Away From It All, 2013) ran for the Senate in Maryland in 2011 and for Congress in 2014, both times unsuccessfully. As he writes, he “had resigned from the agency…to run in a deep blue state, as a Republican, against the sitting President’s policies.” The connotation is that Bongino’s inside-the-Beltway position revealed many disturbing secrets about policymaking and political access. Yet his discussion of his Secret Service career is mainly anecdotal, interspersed with assertions about his peers’ unparalleled abilities and teamwork. Otherwise, Bongino holds the federal government in contempt, particularly his former commander in chief: “President Obama and his hard-left allies will never understand ‘the code’ [of the Secret Service] because they will never understand ‘the team.’ ” This disdain for Obama drives much of the narrative. The author’s tactic is to introduce a particular buzzworthy scandal—e.g., the IRS’s targeting of conservative nonprofits, the purported Benghazi cover-up, the prisoner swap involving Bowe Bergdahl—and then follow up with overlong paragraphs that don’t move beyond insinuation. He thus insists these matters reveal “an administration where the sheer number of government scandals and abuses of power overwhelmed the institutional defense mechanisms.” In late chapters, Bongino focuses on perceived flaws of American electoral politics, with broad-canvas topics like “Why Blue States Matter.” His writing becomes more thoughtful when he looks past his obsession with Obama’s “collectivism,” but it remains studded with platitudes—e.g., “Americans never surrendered their homes and fortunes to the whims and wants of either bandits or bureaucrats.” Even the author’s more interesting political observations and anecdotes, such as advising conservatives to emulate progressive groups’ tactics while ignoring their messages, underline his fundamental cynicism.
A book that will appeal to readers convinced that Benghazi and Hillary Clinton’s email habits are the most pressing concerns Americans now face.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-08298-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
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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