Heavy on affirmative experiences; light on political insight.
Side-by-side diaries from the first Jewish candidate for vice-president and his wife chronicle some laughs and some letdowns, but no regrets.
The Liebermans take refuge at every opportunity in platitudes about faith, freedom, diversity, and other perceived “only in America” attributes, but no one can say they don’t come from the heart. The couple’s account of the harrowing emotional roller coaster that the Democratic national campaign was for them also displays a regrettable tendency to inject well-worn Seinfeldian humor whenever there’s a lull in the action. There are, however, some genuinely funny moments. Witness the Lieberman tribe walking its dutiful mile and a half to Sabbath services in Connecticut interspersed with a Secret Service platoon whose members try to blend in by wearing those white silk skullcaps usually reserved for gentile guests at weddings and bar mitzvahs—until somebody points out that they stand out like a bunch of, well, Secret Service guys. There are few political surprises in Joe’s recounting: Bush surprised Gore in the TV debates, he feels; gun-owning Democrats were a big vulnerability; and he still believes his ticket would have taken Florida and thus the presidency had all the votes cast been counted. The only time the senator shows any real rancor, however, is in condemning Ralph Nader (“once my hero”) for falsely lumping mainstream Democrats with Republicans as running roughshod over the environment on behalf of big corporations. Hadassah’s narratives seem fresher than her husband’s, and quite revealing about the energy-sapping triviality of the spousal role in a national campaign. She loves her Joey and truly respects Al Gore as presidential material, but couldn’t she please, after all, have her own airplane, even if it’s just a little one?
Heavy on affirmative experiences; light on political insight.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7432-2938-X
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2002
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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