A complement and corrective to the Clintons’ own memoirs, full of surprising turns that do much to explain the recent...
A revealing look at the Clinton presidency, characterized by great ambitions and shattering failures.
Washington Post reporter Harris traces several themes that dominated the Clinton years, many of which emerged early on. One was the so-called Travelgate affair, concerning a team of career staff dedicated to making travel arrangements for reporters on the road with the president. Hillary Clinton is said to have remarked of them, “We need those people out. We need our people in,” setting in motion their firing and a subsequent riling of a good number of reporters. She denied involvement, Bill Clinton denied knowing anything about it—and in 2000 federal prosecutors concluded that Hillary had made false statements about the matter. Another theme is a leitmotif: Harris’s favorite word for the Clintons in retreat—as they so often retreated from such topics as health care and gays in the military—is “sullen,” and sullen they often are in these pages. Yet another theme is Clinton’s resistance to established protocols, such as going through a switchboard operator to make a phone call and going to a fast-food restaurant whenever he wanted. When he discovered that the White House had a few elements in common with a prison, he became, well, sullen. Against this backdrop, Harris deftly explains critical losses that seem all the more tragic in retrospect: Had Clinton not been crippled by the matter of Monica Lewinsky, for instance, he might have been able to see through Social Security reforms before the Republicans got their fingers into the coffers. And that’s another theme: how steadily, corrosively damaging the whole sordid Lewinsky affair was, how clumsy Clinton was in handling it. Harris portrays a presidency in constant crisis, but also with an undeniable grandeur as Bill Clinton worked his charms on even the toughest opponents and urged a greater vision of America on those who listened.
A complement and corrective to the Clintons’ own memoirs, full of surprising turns that do much to explain the recent past—and the unfolding political present.Pub Date: June 7, 2005
ISBN: 0-375-50847-3
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2005
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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