A well-crafted book full of pointed lessons in how not to run a country—and sure to rouse suspicions of sedition in certain...
Give a demagogue a pliant press and colleagues fearful of losing power if they protest his excesses, and you have McCarthyism—or perhaps the current Congress.
It only seems, writes Johnson (The Best of Times, 2001, etc.), that America “entered an unprecedented era of stress and danger—an Age of Anxiety unlike anything experienced before” after the 9/11 attacks. But the early Cold War years were more dislocating: Fear was everywhere in the air, and all a power-hungry politico like Joseph McCarthy, literally schooled in Mein Kampf, had to do was find the right nerve to probe. He found it in the widespread fear that Commies lurked under every bed and in every closet, and for a couple of years he ran the nation. “In retrospect,” writes Johnson in this incisive portrait, “it’s incredible to recall the depths to which McCarthyism descended and the damage it wrought.” But, Johnson adds, McCarthy would not have succeeded had he not been backed by “an ever-expanding network of anticommunists,” including conservative media commentators, think-tankers and clerics, to say nothing of employers and advertisers who withdrew support from those whom McCarthy denounced. The parallels are evident; what is absent from the modern stage, Johnson suggests, is a strong moderate Republican wing of the kind that eventually turned against the red-baiters and restored order. Johnson might have forged the linkage of the McCarthy era to the current days of Gitmo and the Patriot Act more strongly, and the genesis-of-fear thesis could have used some grounding in the terrible Reagan-era days of Ground Zero, but overall his point holds: The current political climate is much more reactionary, he writes, than that of McCarthy’s time, and it wouldn’t take much to break a democracy that in so many ways already appears broken.
A well-crafted book full of pointed lessons in how not to run a country—and sure to rouse suspicions of sedition in certain quarters.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-15-101062-5
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
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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