The author’s mixture of personal memories and research produces a fine addition to the history of both Eisenhower and the...
Dwight Eisenhower’s grandson, David (Communications/Univ. of Pennsylvania; Eisenhower at War, 1943-1945, 1991), and Richard Nixon’s daughter, Julie (Pat Nixon: The Untold Story, 1986, etc.), present an amiable and insightful memoir of the ex-president’s retirement years.
On leaving office, the former president and his wife moved to his Gettysburg, Pa., farm to live near his son and grandchildren, including the then 12 year-old author, David. The bruising 1960 presidential campaign left him bitterly resentful of President Kennedy and no fan of the press, especially when polls gave his presidency low marks (his rank has risen steadily since). The author adds that Eisenhower remained a national hero and the most influential Republican. Former Vice President Nixon was in temporary eclipse, having lost the presidency in 1960 and lost again in California’s 1962 governor’s race. Despite his influence and for reasons the author never makes clear, Eisenhower hung back from exerting it even in matters dear to his heart. Although he opposed conservative Barry Goldwater as Republican nominee in 1964, his refusal to endorse the candidates he preferred, Nelson Rockefeller and William Scranton, may have tipped the balance against them. The author intermixes politics with an affectionate account of Eisenhower’s domestic routine, which included a great deal of TV watching, golf, bridge, painting and socializing with wealthy friends, but also writing, intense devotion to running a working farm and delivering sage advice to young people, including the adolescent author. Few readers will be surprised at the former president’s lack of sympathy with ’60s morals, music and civil disorder, but the author stresses that he disliked discrimination against blacks and supported Kennedy’s and Johnson’s civil-rights legislation.
The author’s mixture of personal memories and research produces a fine addition to the history of both Eisenhower and the ’60s.Pub Date: Oct. 26, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4391-9090-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2010
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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