Love the magazine or not, Hubbell’s memoir deserves a read.
A memoir from someone who knew Reader’s Digest inside and out, including its legendary founder William “Wally” Roy DeWitt Wallace.
Veteran journalist Hubbell offers stories about the place where he happily worked for 40 years. Hubbell (born 1927) was a University of Minnesota journalism grad who, after a couple of false starts, submitted an article to the Reader’s Digest. They liked it, Wally hired him, and the rest is his career. It seems almost a charmed life, and he would surely admit as much. Hubbell wasn’t an editor for the Digest; instead, he wrote original investigative pieces and quickly made a name for himself with expertise in military and political matters. In these pages, one finds stories about tense moments in the Cold War, the Vietnam War, PGA highlights (Hubbell loved the game of golf), presidential quirks, Edward Teller and the strategic Defense Initiative, and also biographical stuff about Hubbell’s growing up, all of which forms an engaging picture of an ambitious young man’s rise. He seemed to know everyone who was anyone, especially because, as he repeatedly points out here, working for enormously popular Reader’s Digest provided ready access to those in power (particularly those who shared the Digest’s patriotic, establishmentarian take on things). Although there were some liberals at the Digest—the Vietnam War showed the fault lines—Hubbell was basically conservative, like Wally. Hubbell is almost idolatrous of Wally, and it is hard to fault him on that score: the man was a genial genius at what he did. Aside from a few typos, the narrative has a handful of awkward sentences: e.g., “We are at sea for perhaps an hour, and I am standing near the Skipper, who is standing on a slightly raised platform in the Control Room, near his periscope, which is not up.” Hubbell also doesn’t follow standard usage for periods, commas, and quotation marks, which might distract readers. Still, the story’s a good one. Wally died in 1981, and while he tried to protect the legacy of the Digest, gradually the managerial side won out over the editorial vision that had been true to Wally’s vision. Today, in and out of bankruptcy, Wally’s brainchild is on life support.
Love the magazine or not, Hubbell’s memoir deserves a read.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1484913017
Page Count: 464
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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