Liberal social policy—once regnant, now at bay—is the subject of this loosely organized, often bitterly observant collection of essays and speeches by New York's senior US senator. Moynihan (Pandemonium, 1993; On the Law of Nations, 1990) has carved out a niche as the Paul Revere of the Senate, raising alarms at approaching menaces. In the wake of the Republican takeover of the House and Senate in the 1994 midyear elections, Moynihan, one of the few Democratic survivors of the electoral bloodbath, assessed how fellow Democrats (rarely himself—there's an overwhelming whiff of ``I told you so'' here) lost the old consensus for activist government. Moynihan is in a position to know: He worked as an assistant to presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, and has served four terms as a Senator. We have, he argues, moved into a postindustrial age in which the economy operates smoothly but social ills proliferate. Our social legislation, largely based on 19th-century European models, is not designed to handle such challenges. We need, he asserts, to rethink the very basis of social legislation. His most heartfelt remarks concern the crisis of illegitimacy, which he first noted in the 1965 Moynihan Report, a paper that sparked such denunciation by various groups as to close off serious discussion for nearly two decades. Now, after left-liberal denials of social problems, we witness punitive welfare legislation (passed over Moynihan's impassioned objections) that verges on ``vengeance against children.'' Other pieces include a dissection of the Clinton administration's bungled attempt at health care reform, an impassioned call to route drug-war funds to programs that can reduce drug use, and an attack on the balanced- budget amendment as a bludgeon that can exacerbate an economic reverse. Hardly a coherent ``history,'' as the subtitle implies, but sobering reflections nonetheless on the cost of precipitous action taken without the benefit of social science research or humane reflection.
Pub Date: Oct. 15, 1996
ISBN: 0-674-57440-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
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
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