A diatribe in black and white that will leave many yearning for a shade of gray.
Teddy Roosevelt is beaten to a pulp with his own big stick.
A senior fellow at the Cato Institute, revisionist historian Powell (FDR’s Folly, Wilson’s War, 2005) conducts an all-out assault on the presidential record of Theodore Roosevelt, who may have charmed other writers but wins not a single plaudit here. Powell indicts Roosevelt as a man who vastly expanded executive power; interfered “recklessly” in the lives of Americans and the affairs of other countries; and left a legacy of big government and global interventionism that continues to this day. Turning each of Roosevelt’s most noted actions on its head, the author argues that Teddy did not bust trusts (but promoted monopolies); did not help purify food (but helped special interests); and, most egregiously, did not advance American conservation (but “degraded much of our natural environment” through ill-advised dam-building and forest policies). What’s more, Roosevelt’s “soak the rich” federal income tax has proven intrusive and burdensome for all. Even Roosevelt’s progressive cohorts do not escape Powell’s tireless bludgeoning: Muckraking journalists were melodramatic and wrongheaded in their attacks on big business, and Jacob Riis failed to realize how much better off the poor were than in the past. Readers who share Powell’s enthusiasm for limited government and free markets will doubtless enjoy this skewering of a widely admired president; others will be astonished to read that nothing about Teddy was as it seemed, that his stated good intentions always led to dark deeds and that, no matter how appealing his heroic and romantic manner, he deserves no place on the “best Presidents” list. “Contrary to what the many worshipful books about him would have us believe, Roosevelt has proved to be a scourge rather than a salvation,” the author writes.
A diatribe in black and white that will leave many yearning for a shade of gray.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-23722-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2006
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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