A hagiographic survey of an activist president agitating on the wrong side of history. A decent resource, but readers are...
Herbert Hoover (1874-1964) as a lifelong champion of true GOP ideals.
In a thorough, overly sympathetic biography, Jeansonne (Emeritus, History/Univ. of Wisconsin-Milwaukee) asserts that the Great Humanitarian got a bad rap serving as president during the outbreak of the Great Depression. The author of an earlier work on Hoover (The Life of Herbert Hoover, Fighting Quaker: 1928-1935, 2012), as well as other books on 20th-century history, Jeansonne finds that Hoover cultivated his “pure heart” as a small-town Iowa Quaker and orphan who grew up in the great outdoors, hence his love of nature and tendency to trust his own instincts. A well-regarded engineer after his Stanford education and married to a professional geologist, Hoover became hugely wealthy from Burma mining interests by age 40. With the onset of World War I, he dedicated his energies to helping feed the starving people of Belgium, among others, under President Woodrow Wilson, and later as commerce secretary under President Warren Harding and his successor, Calvin Coolidge. With his national following at the grass-roots level helping propel him into the White House in 1928, Hoover was a strong proponent of women’s suffrage, abided by Prohibition, and worked on disarming the country for a peaceful future. However, his first eight months of “whirlwind reform” were quickly overshadowed by such economic woes as farm relief—i.e., the vilified Smoot-Hawley Tariff, which the author concedes Hoover would have been “wiser” to have vetoed. Rather than anything Hoover did or could have done, argues Jeansonne, the stock market crash ultimately did him in. Indeed, Hoover created many measures Franklin Roosevelt would implement, such as large-scale public works. Despite Hoover’s “prophetic” words, he was largely blamed for the economic crash, and he spent much of the rest of his career excoriating the New Deal and advocating for keeping the U.S. out of World War II.
A hagiographic survey of an activist president agitating on the wrong side of history. A decent resource, but readers are encouraged to also consult Charles Rappleye’s Herbert Hoover in the White House (2016).Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-99100-8
Page Count: 464
Publisher: New American Library
Review Posted Online: Aug. 9, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
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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