Duchàne, Monnet's aide and a correspondent for The Economist, here sets out to chart the remarkable, if somewhat obscure, life of the architect of the European Community and also—a lesser-known fact—of America's wartime munitions effort. Monnet was one of those men who spend their lives forging contacts with the useful, the powerful, and the discreetly influential. Born into a prosperous family in Cognac in 1888, he acquired a merchant's internationalist outlook selling the region's eponymous brandy all over the world. Early in life, he felt at ease with the Anglo-Saxon world and believed that he could mediate between it and a suspicious France. His moment came in WW I, when he coordinated supply trains among the Allies. So began a long career of manipulating economic agreements between democracies, including a highly successful stint as munitions advisor in Washington during WW II. After the war, Adenauer and the German government turned to Monnet to negotiate a steel pact between the French and German cartels that would lay the basis for a lasting economic entente, allaying French fears of steel-based German militarism and market domination while preserving Germany's centuries-old tradition of steel manufacture. The result was the embryo of the European Economic Community, a vision that Monnet had harbored as early as 1943, when he and De Gaulle first discussed the shape of liberated Europe. Men like Monnet, according to Duchàne, were able to create the EEC because they were not politicians but enlightened technocrats—a breed with a bad name these days. As this book makes clear, however, technocrats can be a saving grace in periods of turmoil. This is not a very personal book; readers would be better advised to turn to Monnet's own memoirs. But it does reveal a complete and satisfying picture of a complex age of transition for Western Europe.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1994
ISBN: 0-393-03497-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994
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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