The former president presents his autobiography in the form of annotated letters, journal entries, a few speeches, and assorted documents. Like many collections of letters, this one is not uniformly interesting. Some of the scores of letters are dull, some superfluous, others patently self-serving (and readers may wonder if the many ellipses replace some of the most revealing passages). But Bush emerges as an uncomplicated, decent, thoughtful man—a man who unashamedly espouses the values of hearth, home, and friendship (and dog ownership!), who was at all times exactly what he appeared to be, who loved his wife (he says that he wants on his gravestone only these words: “He loved Barbara very much”), loved his children, loved his country. The letters are chronological—beginning with a section called “Love and War,” ending with “Looking Forward”—and chronicle in surprising detail Bush’s life from his 1942 enlistment in the navy to the present. In the letters (and in his accompanying notes) are some fascinating comments and events. Young Barbara (not yet his wife) was “so darn attractive”; Bill Clinton (then governor) was “a very nice man”; John Dean (the Watergate whistle-blower) was “a small, slimy guy”; Pat Buchanan could be “mean and ugly”; Barbara snores; Bush “never regretted” selecting Dan Quayle as his running mate; he was enraged at Newsweek for a cover story that suggested he was a wimp; and his “damnedest experience” was throwing up on the Japanese prime minister in 1992. Although Bush hates psychological profiles, he reveals a bit of his inner life here, most poignantly so when he admits that his loss to Clinton “hurt, hurt, hurt.” Somewhat nettlesome is Bush’s insistence on referring to just about everyone as a friend, close friend, or great friend. Please. One must search carefully in this large brown carpet to find the silver and golden threads—but they are there.
Pub Date: Oct. 5, 1999
ISBN: 0-684-83958-X
Page Count: 634
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1999
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
SEEN & HEARD
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