A penetrating, firsthand view of history.
A timely reminder of a notorious scandal that resulted in a president’s impeachment.
In 1973, Wine-Banks, now a legal analyst for MSNBC and formerly Illinois solicitor general and deputy attorney general, joined a government task force assigned to investigate the Nixon administration’s burglary of the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate building. In her absorbing debut memoir, the author recalls her experiences as a young lawyer participating in what was then “the biggest political scandal in US history”: questioning witnesses, wresting tapes from the White House, dealing with blatant sexism from some of her male colleagues and superiors, and, at the same time, facing the deterioration of her marriage. Among the witnesses, Nixon’s secretary Rose Mary Woods proved frustrating for Wine-Banks, who worried that her demeanor in confronting the stalwart Woods reflected her “youth and vulnerability.” Repeatedly questioned about the erasure of 18 minutes from a crucial White House tape, Woods maintained that she had done it accidentally. Also frustrating was the wily Jeb Magruder, whom the author characterizes as a consummate liar, whose testimony was vital for the case. “Often, when I questioned Magruder,” Wine-Banks writes, “I could feel my chest tightening and my voice turning harsh and scolding.” Despite Nixon’s refusal to hand over the key tapes, claiming that no court could “compel a president to any action,” a grand jury, comprised of ordinary Americans, did just that, “unafraid to challenge the president of the United States, the most powerful man in the world.” The author’s portrayal makes the impeachment process, which received bipartisan support, seem almost quaint. Today, she sees history repeating itself in a “more complicated political, social, and cultural landscape than existed in the 1970s.” “Like Nixon,” she writes, “Trump is corrupt, amoral, vindictive, paranoid, ruthless, and narcissistic.” But he is more dangerous, she believes, “because he exceeds Nixon in hatefulness and venality” and “puts in peril the fundamental principles on which our nation was founded.”
A penetrating, firsthand view of history.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-24432-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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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