A wide-ranging biography of perennial also-ran Adlai Stevenson which demonstrates that character is destiny. Stevenson has been the subject of several recent books, but Baker (History/ Goucher Coll.; Mary Todd Lincoln, 1987) affords his life a depth, historical and personal, that few other writers have acknowledged. She traces Stevenson's family history at length to Scotland, then Ulster, the adopted home of many Presbyterian Scots who would later fuel America's expansion beyond the Appalachian Mountains. The Stevensons were actors in that expansion, moving from Pennsylvania across into Kentucky after Daniel Boone opened that territory, later settling in the fertile bottomlands of Illinois, where they would become farmers, solid citizens, and important politicians (Stevenson's grandfather was Grover Cleveland's second-term vice president). Baker suggests that with this pedigree Stevenson could have become nothing but a leader. Long portrayed as a misunderstood saint of American politics, Stevenson turns out in Baker's account to have had the full range of human frailties. He conducted simultaneous affairs with two women—a journalist and a State Department assistant secretary; both evidently believed that Stevenson would divorce his long-suffering wife to marry them. As governor of Illinois, he illegally paid bonuses to favorite political aides from a private fund. ``Blinkered by self-righteousness,'' Baker writes, ``Stevenson overlooked any possibility of influence peddling on him.'' For all that, he emerges as an unjustly abused fellow, smeared by his association with Alger Hiss, derided as an ``egghead'' by Dwight Eisenhower, and calumniated by such right-wing propagandists as Walter Winchell, who, believing Herbert Hoover's assertion that Stevenson was homosexual, proclaimed, ``A vote for Adlai Stevenson is a vote for [transsexual] Christine Jorgensen and a woman in the White House.'' Baker writes with sympathy and considerable vigor, and this fine biography takes a refreshingly long view of an important figure in recent political history.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-393-03874-2
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1995
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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