D'Souza (Illiberal Education, 1991, etc.) breaks with most Reagan administration alumni by idolizing the former president rather than writing a critical kiss-and-tell memoir. Crediting Reagan with doing ``more than any single man in the second half of the twentieth century to shape the world we live in,'' D'Souza presents a straightforward theme: Despite some personal flaws, Reagan was an outstanding statesman and leader. His method is familiar, though less straightforward. By playing off the usual foils—liberals and Democrats, of course, but especially ``pundits'' and ``intellectuals''—he portrays Reagan's career as a series of triumphs over his critics. A master of this style, D'Souza carefully selects quotations that cast aspersions on Reagan and his policies, then demonstrates that time after time the political wise men were wrong and Reagan was right. Focusing on partisan and ideological disputes allows him to avoid potentially embarrassing policy decisions such as the sending of marines to Lebanon, and there are continuing opportunities to disparage favored targets. There is also an odd tendency to document the comments of critics more thoroughly than Reagan's thoughts and intentions. Getting inside Reagan's head undoubtedly poses difficulties, but this is what D'Souza's arguments apparently require. In situations where some observers found Reagan inattentive and obtuse, for example, D'Souza sees ``the guise of being distracted,'' a subtle strategy for managing people. Whether Reagan was being sly or was really asleep would seem to be an important issue, but sorting out such details is not what this effort is all about. Political posturing aside, this is a glib volume that will warm the hearts of those who harbor a nostalgia for the Reagan era. (Author tour; radio satellite tour)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-684-84428-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1997
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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