Good for newcomers seeking insight into contemporary foreign policy.
Journalistic account of Condoleezza Rice’s tenure as Secretary of State from a veteran reporter who covered it for the Washington Post.
Although Rice is the focal point, this is really a history of the last three years in international affairs. Kessler delivers fly-on-the-wall coverage as the most powerful woman in the world travels the earth attempting to cool off global hotspots. His chatty chapter titles (“Rebirth in Paris,” “Passage to New Delhi,” Blowup Over Beirut”) belie a deeply reported analysis. Kessler paints Rice as a smart, sophisticated diplomat stuck between a bellicose administration and an increasingly restless global community. After 9/11, this scholar of Soviet Russia trained in the realist school of foreign policy suddenly adopted her president’s messianic worldview, favoring the promotion of democracy at the expense of all else. Her handlers try to position Rice for an eventual White House run, but Kessler argues that her tenure as Secretary has left the country in a far worse position than she found it. She failed, he argues, to articulate a serious vision for the future and is undercut by elements in the administration, such as Cheney and Rumsfeld, who favor a more isolationist approach. The book doesn’t cover very much new ground, instead providing an in-depth look at how decisions of world-historical importance get made. Those looking for gossipy speculation about what motivates the unmarried Rice, a child of Southern segregation turned Stanford provost, will be disappointed. Readers curious about what really happens when she sits across from her counterparts in Riyadh, Khartoum and Baghdad will find this up-the-minute account revealing.
Good for newcomers seeking insight into contemporary foreign policy.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-312-36380-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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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