A troubling exposé that might lead to conclusive proof of misdeeds currently suspected but not definitively researched.
The most recent in a big stack of books exposing former President Richard M. Nixon as dishonest and dangerous.
During Nixon’s presidency, longtime White House reporter Fulsom wrote about him for United Press International. Here the author pulls together previous research by other authors, mixing in occasional material newly released from archives, including memos written by FBI agents. Among other indictments of Nixon, Fulsom alleges more extensive ties to organized crime than previously acknowledged; a homosexual relationship with Bebe Rebozo, one of Nixon's links to organized crime; vocal expressions of homophobia and anti-Semitism, taking hypocrisy and hatred to unprecedented levels within the White House; physical abuse of his wife, as well as abusive treatment of White House and political campaign aides; involvement in actual and planned murders of politicians and journalists considered to be enemies; and treason committed during the Vietnam War. Many of Fulsom's allegations—some of which can fairly be labeled sensationalistic—are difficult to evaluate because they rely on a mixture of direct evidence, circumstantial evidence, rumor and gossip. For example, some researchers have found FBI memoranda to frequently contain factual and contextual inaccuracies as a matter of course; the author does not meaningfully address the reliability and validity of some of what he presents as evidence. Though flawed, Fulsom's indictment is too extensive and potentially important to be relegated to the dustbin of recent history. The author is convinced beyond a reasonable doubt of Nixon's crimes.
A troubling exposé that might lead to conclusive proof of misdeeds currently suspected but not definitively researched.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-66296-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2011
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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