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SLY AND ABLE

A POLITICAL BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES F. BYRNES

This biography of South Carolina politician Byrnes offers historical insight but ultimately descends into hagiography. Robertson traces James Byrnes's rise from poverty in his native Charleston, S.C., to the House of Representatives, the Senate, the Supreme Court, a tenure as so-called ``assistant president'' to FDR during WW II, his stint as secretary of state under Truman, and, finally, his governorship of South Carolina. Robertson (who has taught creative writing at Clemson Univ.) recounts Byrnes's special relationship with FDR and his great disappointment when Roosevelt, after leading Byrnes to believe that he would be his vice presidential running mate in 1944, excluded him from the ticket. He was deemed too antilabor, and his reputation as a racist was seen as a threat to the black vote for FDR in the North. Furthermore, Byrnes who had been born a Catholic, had converted to Protestantism, and this alienated both Catholics and Protestants. Thus Byrnes ``almost'' became president, but because of his political drawbacks, it was Harry Truman who garnered that prize. Byrnes topped off his career by successfully running for governor of his home state. He is remembered as a racist who did his best to fight the Supreme Court's landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision. In his latter years, Byrnes was in the vanguard of Democrats backing Republican candidates before the GOP was acceptable in Dixie. Robertson's romanticizing of Byrnes borders on hero worship. He makes the hyperbolic statement that Byrnes had better political skills than FDR, who is considered by most historians to have been the country's master politician. Robertson's writing is also riddled with clichÇs, and redundancies clog the text. Although we learn much about Byrnes and the politics of his era, this work is, in the end, disappointing. Byrnes, an important figure, deserves a better biography.

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994

ISBN: 0-393-03367-8

Page Count: 576

Publisher: Norton

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

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INTO THE WILD

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)

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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