A compelling re-telling of one of the saddest and most intriguing life stories in American politics.
Newsweek assistant managing editor Thomas (The Very Best Men, 1995, etc.) enlivens his engrossing RFK biography with fresh interviews and the use of previously restricted sources.
Unlike his princely elder brothers, Robert Kennedy was not blessed with ease or grace, nor could he bask, as they did, in the ambitious attentions of their powerful father. RFK did, however, possess courage and determination in prodigious degrees, and Thomas stresses that it was through the exercise of these qualities that RFK won for himself a place of honor, first in his family, and finally in American politics. Thomas paints a moving portrait of RFK as a boy, the runt of his family and a poor student, fighting determinedly to win the admiration of his father and of his elder brothers, all of whom he regarded with reverence. Through these struggles RFK gained a feeling of fellowship with outsiders and underdogs, which would be most famously displayed during his tragic campaign for the presidential nomination. His ferocity and determination were also put at the service of elder brother John, whose political campaigns he managed and whom he would serve as Attorney General and most trusted adviser. John had once dismissed his brooding little brother as “Black Robert,” but he eventually came to appreciate his loyalty and his dogged determination to win. After John’s assassination, RFK devoted years to mourning him. Although Thomas conveys the powerful sense of hope RFK’s campaign awakened, he does not speculate on what RFK might have accomplished if he’d avoided the assassin’s bullet. Instead, he ends his account with a description of RFK’s eloquently simple grave—which is fitting, since it is from the unfulfilled promise of a candidate who combined determined courage with a gentle concern for underdogs that the fascination with RFK mainly springs.
A compelling re-telling of one of the saddest and most intriguing life stories in American politics.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2000
ISBN: 0-684-83480-4
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2000
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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