Light enough for a dentist’s waiting room, but substantial enough to amuse and inform White House watchers and students of...
Madmen, murderers, miscreants, martyrs: presidents’ children are just like the rest of us, only more so.
So one would conclude from this thoroughgoing compendium by former Bush I administration staffer Wead, whose researches began as a memorandum to the current president when he was contemplating his first run for Texas governor. (No president’s child had ever successfully run for governor, he warned Bush II.) Being the child of a president can be tough duty, Wead capably shows; it makes for loneliness, paranoia, high rates of divorce and alcoholism, and a life expectancy lower than the national norm. It can lead to maladjustment and exceptional nastiness, as witness Alice Roosevelt Longworth, who specialized in bitter complaint about just about every conceivable topic throughout her long life. (Teddy’s daughter died at 96 in 1980, having outlived every other presidential child.) It can yield spasms of rebellion: Patti Davis, Ronald Reagan’s daughter, for example, “took loud, public stands against her father’s policies.” Yet there have also been well-adjusted, happy, and productive presidential progeny: William Howard Taft’s daughter Helen, a notable suffragette; Gerald Ford’s son Steve, an actor familiar to fans of The Young and the Restless and Black Hawk Down; and Amy Carter, a hardworking humanitarian like father Jimmy. Wead’s well-written, gossipy narrative is good fun to read, though it doesn’t boast much analytical power. Readers can fashion from it just about any case they care to on the question of whether a president’s kid is apt to turn out a hero like Webb Hayes (son of Rutherford), who won the Congressional Medal of Honor, or a loser like Marshall Polk (adopted son of James), who died in prison.
Light enough for a dentist’s waiting room, but substantial enough to amuse and inform White House watchers and students of political history.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2003
ISBN: 0-7434-4631-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2003
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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