For students of American politics and history, an intriguing, unique window into the formation of one of the country’s most...
A fascinating album of the Kennedy matriarch’s collection of family photos focusing on the first half of the 20th century.
As with most photo albums, this one includes, among an abundance of static group shots and portraits, loads of candid shots of happy-seeming children playing sports, holding pets, reaching milestones, at home, at school, at holidays abroad and by the sea. Rose (nee Fitzgerald) and Joseph P. Kennedy’s family portraits are densely populated. Their brood, begun with Joe Jr. in 1915, grew to include nine children in all with the birth of Teddy in 1932. As if the sheer size of the clan were not enough to engage the casual observer, what makes these photos particularly interesting is that they are, of course, of the Kennedys. They may look at first glance like an ordinary, if privileged, group of American kids marching (or running, swimming and sledding) inexorably toward maturity through the Jazz Age, the Depression and World War II. But among these sometimes-gawky, sometimes-silly, often proud-looking children are the eerily recognizable young faces of the future president, his attorney general, and the longtime senior senator from Massachusetts. “A mother knows,” Rose said of the first time she held her own infant, “that hers is the influence that can make that little, precious being into a leader, an inspiration, a shining light to the world.” The handsomely displayed photos are explicated by straightforward history, snippets of family correspondence, and precise and informative captions. The themes of the collection are happiness, innocence and achievement; the collection ends with Jack’s successful run for Congress in 1946, with only occasional tastes of the tragedies to come.
For students of American politics and history, an intriguing, unique window into the formation of one of the country’s most enduring and controversial dynasties.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4555-4480-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2013
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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