Hickenlooper draws an analogy between brewing and politics (the activist as yeast, the political leader as brewer), but...
Colorado’s high-profile governor submits an unconventional autobiography.
When it comes to political memoirs, a notoriously guarded, agenda-driven genre, readers are not wrong to be wary. What, then, to make of this exquisitely timed publication by a two-term governor of a purple state only months before his party casts about for a vice presidential nominee? Hickenlooper has lived a life sufficiently varied and interesting that his run for office doesn’t occur until past the midpoint of the narrative. Elected Denver’s mayor in 2002, he became the first in 125 years to move from that office to the governorship in 2010. When politics takes over the story, we’re in the familiar, dreary territory taken up with bouquets to supporters and subordinates, tributes to gritty and resilient constituents, electoral obstacles overcome, problems solved, and controversial issues confronted—in Hickenlooper’s case, fracking, same-sex unions, legalizing marijuana, and capital punishment. The author emerges with pretty high marks, but we’re inclined to credit him because of the apparent honesty he brings to his public career. With the help of Potter (Shadows in the Vineyard: The True Story of the Plot to Poison the World’s Greatest Wine, 2014, etc.), who served as the author’s speechwriter, Hickenlooper recounts his troubled boyhood, his peripatetic and protracted academic career—he’s the only Wesleyan student ever to receive “tenure”—his checkered love life, his (largely failed) artistic ambitions and endeavors, his dabbling in real estate, his mostly unsatisfying stint as a geologist, and his wildly successful run as a brewpub entrepreneur. All this entertains wonderfully: the brushes with the famous—Yoko Ono, Phil Donahue, etc.—the colorful anecdotes about the campaign to save “Mile High,” the beer label authored by Kurt Vonnegut, the Quaker ancestor who was also a brewer.
Hickenlooper draws an analogy between brewing and politics (the activist as yeast, the political leader as brewer), but however apt that metaphor, it’s difficult to imagine a more unusual preparation for public life than the one ably recounted here.Pub Date: May 24, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-98167-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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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