A worthy reexamination of the politician whom many remember fondly today—yet who is still likened to Harold Stassen as a...
Thoughtful biography of the quintessential American liberal who, toward the end of his political career, was “challenging the very premises of the liberalism that he had himself championed.”
Born in 1916 into an Irish-German Catholic family in rural Minnesota, Eugene McCarthy came to exemplify a political philosophy that, writes Sandbrook (History/Univ. of Sheffield), is “best understood in relation to European conservatism rather than American liberalism”: in the ’50s, he, like William Buckley and Eric Voegelin, would call for a “re-Christianization of social institutions” and publicly lament the decline of family values and old-school traditions. Yet McCarthy was squarely in the American liberal tradition by the beginning of the ’60s, when Democratic political leaders embraced New Deal activism domestically while advocating an aggressively anticommunist Pax Americana internationally. A few years later, when it became clear that Lyndon Johnson would accomplish neither, McCarthy found himself in opposition to his own party; as a US senator in 1966, writes Sandbrook, McCarthy’s score as a voter against the conservative coalition was “a creditable 86 percent, in 1967 it fell to 45 percent, barely half of the scores registered by Mondale, Muskie, and the Kennedy brothers” (when McCarthy bothered to show up, that is, for his roll-call attendance was at the bottom of the Democratic roster). Still, he also opposed the Vietnam War, and as a peace candidate gained a following large enough to threaten Hubert Humphrey’s candidacy in the 1968 presidential election. McCarthy effectively squandered any chance of taking the lead, however, through a number of missteps that Sandbrook attributes to arrogance: his loss “was not because of a lack of aptitude, but because of a failure of application.” That failure, Sandbrook suggests, is one reason so few politicos utter the l-word anything but scornfully today.
A worthy reexamination of the politician whom many remember fondly today—yet who is still likened to Harold Stassen as a born loser.Pub Date: March 30, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-4105-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2004
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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