Students of modern history will take great interest in this work, which ably straddles the frontiers of the personal,...
One of 20th-century America’s most significant diplomats offers a window into his inner life and private concerns, fears and dreams.
With an eye to posterity, Kennan (1904–2005) assiduously kept a diary for nearly 90 years, compiling thousands of pages on everything from his impressions of Soviet leaders to notes on wave patterns in the North Atlantic. Costigliola (History/Univ. of Connecticut; Roosevelt's Lost Alliances: How Personal Politics Helped Start the Cold War, 2011, etc.) has selected the most representative and revealing passages for this dauntingly thick but eminently readable volume. In this age of ubiquitous social networking and oversharing, it seems remarkable that Kennan could write so much, about so many topics, without being dull or self-absorbed, but nearly every entry contains a perspicacious observation or insight. His dry wit is evident from the earliest years: At Princeton, he complained of an assigned book, “[i]t is really a great aid in the allopathic treatment I am taking this spring to cure my imaginative tendency, because it takes real assiduous mental concentration to dope a sentence out of it.” Displaying a tendency toward self-doubt that he hid in his confident public pronouncements and publications, Kennan’s diary entries evince an enduring belief that he could never quite live up to the goals he had set for himself. As early as 1959, he fretted that “[t]he Western world, at least, must today be populated in very great party [sic] by people like myself who have outlived their own intellectual and emotional environment.” Inexorably drawn again to Russia and endowed with an aesthetic and humanist imagination much broader than the State Department could contain, Kennan’s life’s work was, more than any political squabble, a searching for the “answer to the universal question of this wistful, waiting Russian countryside.”
Students of modern history will take great interest in this work, which ably straddles the frontiers of the personal, political and philosophical.Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-393-07327-0
Page Count: 736
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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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