Neither hagiography nor hatchet job, this illuminating, unauthorized biography sticks to the facts to draw a sharp personal and political portrait of the man who became the first baby boomer to be elected President. In his debut book, Pulitzer Prizewinning Washington Post reporter Maraniss uses well-honed journalistic skills to dig out the events of Clinton's life from childhood until the day he declared for the presidency in October 1991. Maraniss interviewed some 400 people, all of whom spoke on the record. The result is a balanced account of Clinton's enormous strengths and weaknesses—a rich, thick narrative crammed with abundant detail and an appropriate amount of interpretative analysis. Maraniss clearly shows that from his days as a teen-aged politico in high school and college, through his years at Oxford University and Yale Law School, and throughout his Arkansas political career, Clinton was always a man of contrasts and contradictions: ``considerate and calculating, easygoing and ambitious, mediator and predator.'' The author notes an instance when Clinton attended a black barbecue and played a round of golf in a restricted club within a matter of hours. This is not the book to go to for specifics about Clinton's sex life, before or after marriage; nor is there an in-depth examination of the Whitewater affair. The author does, however, offer revealing looks at many other aspects of Clinton's life, especially his childhood, his coming of age in England, his handling of the draft during the late 1960s, and his political career in Arkansas. Maraniss fully lives up to his goal of creating ``a fair- minded examination of a complicated human being and the forces that shaped him and his generation.'' (16 pages b&w photos, not seen) (First printing of 50,000; author tour)
Pub Date: March 6, 1995
ISBN: 0-671-87109-9
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
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 2025 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.
