The co-anchor of The MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour and author of the One-Eyed Mack series looks back on his life so far, including his love of buses and his 1983 heart attack. This is the portrait of a hard-working, ethical, innocent, ambitious man who seems to have become one of America's preeminent journalists by dint of sheer earnestness. The book begins and ends with buses. Lehrer's father ran a Kansas mom-and-pop bus line that failed—and so Lehrer conceived a lifelong passion for bus memorabilia in all forms, and for buses like the Flxible Clipper, the Aerocoach, and the ACF-Brill—exotic mechanical beasts that plied the midwestern bus routes of the author's youth. He is deft with the small moments and habits of life: He chides a Marine drill instructor for mispronouncing his name; asks a Secret Service agent if they're going to put the bubble-top on Kennedy's limousine in Dallas; eats pastrami sandwiches with mayo; and gets a one-sentence lesson on interviewing politicians from Nelson Rockefeller: "Look, fella, if people like you could get me to say things I didn't want to say, I wouldn't be here." For Newshour fans who always suspected that MacNeil and Lehrer dress that way on purpose, there's an explication of the "skivvy shirt rule": "Nothing should be noticed or absorbed except the information....There is no such thing as a pretty slide, a zippy piece of music, a trendy shirt, a dynamic set, a tough question, or anything else, if it deflects even a blink of attention from the information." Lehrer, we learn, was turned on to journalism by a Runyonesque Texas newsman named "Sticks" Strahala, and he himself seems to have kept a boyish, wide-eyed cub-reporter enthusiasm intact in the corridors of power. Sometimes hokey, but down to earth, genuinely affecting, and immensely likable.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1930709129
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
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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