A straightforward, though not reflective, memoir from Thomas (Dateline: White House, 1975) on the best beat in the world—covering every president from JFK to Clinton for United Press International. The daughter of Lebanese parents, Thomas grew up in Detroit. She came to her passion for journalism early, having written for her high school and college papers. After covering such beats as the Department of Justice and Capitol Hill, she was assigned to the White House in 1961. As the dean of the White House press corps and the person who delivers the final —Thank you, Mr. President— at press conferences, Thomas has become an instantly recognized fixture among the gaggle who report on the presidency. She has won the respect—and often incurred the wrath—of presidents, first ladies, and press secretaries for her bulldog tenacity and her unenthralled view of their work. Many of her best stories come when she sticks to her aim to provide an impressionistic view of these remarkable men and women (e.g., a scandal-scarred Richard Nixon startling her by asking for her prayers). But her assessments of presidents are conventional, and she is rarely critical of her profession’s shortcomings. For instance, she acknowledges that she enraged LBJ by revealing daughter Luci’s wedding plans before the latter had the chance to discuss them with her father. She fails to see that such matters have nothing whatever to do with her aim to hold government officials accountable and to explain their actions and policies. Moreover, while proud of her firsts as a female reporter (e.g., the first woman recipient of the National Press Club’s Fourth Estate Award), she reveals little about what sustained her against male chauvinists of the media. A crisply written account of jousting between presidents and press, but without much insight into these two institutions that Thomas so clearly reveres. (16 pages b&w photos)
Pub Date: May 7, 1999
ISBN: 0-684-84911-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
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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