A hard-hitting critique of a nation “in mortal peril.”
The longest-serving member of Congress recalls a time when government worked for the people.
In a feisty memoir, Michigan representative Dingell (b. 1926), a Democrat, looks back at nearly six decades of public service, recounting some of his proudest accomplishments, toughest fights, and the regrettable transformation of Congress from “largely a place of comity and mutual respect across the aisle” to a rancorous, partisan body reflecting the “cancer of cynicism eating away at our country” under a president unfit for office. Half of the memoir celebrates the career of the author’s father, a congressman who championed social justice and economic fairness. When John Dingell Sr. died in 1955, his son was persuaded to run for his seat; at the age of 29, he won a special election. Serving with 11 presidents and 10 Speakers of the House and casting more than 25,000 votes, Dingell saw Congress pass bipartisan clean-air amendments, the Affordable Care Act, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and the Endangered Species Act. He also witnessed the rise of the tea party, which populated the House of Representatives with Republicans who had run “against the very idea of the federal government.” Now retired, he watches in frustration as “Republi-cons work overtime to destroy all we’ve achieved and more,” apparently intent “on driving things backward, to return to an America that was less clean, less safe, less fair.” To counter the “rogue president” and his supporters who, “like lemmings, will follow him over any cliff,” Dingell advises “courage and constant vigilance.” Though it may take decades to restore civility, economic justice, and governmental integrity, he offers some concrete suggestions for achieving those goals: full participation in the electoral system, elimination of money in campaigns, the protection of an independent press, and, most drastically, “the end of minority rule in our legislative and executive branches.” With no prospect of eliminating the Electoral College, Dingell advocates a grass-roots movement aimed at abolishing the Senate by combining the two chambers into one.
A hard-hitting critique of a nation “in mortal peril.”Pub Date: Dec. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-257199-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2018
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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