A be-nicer-to-each-other program that’s worth considering though unlikely to take shape in a time of growing division.
The former Ohio governor and Republican presidential candidate urges readers to get their own houses in order.
It’s nice to be nice, and even if the man to whom Kasich lost the 2016 primary isn’t very nice, he counsels “that we shouldn’t be investing all of our emotions in that one office in the White House.” Quoting the likes of the Who and the Kings of Leon, he reckons that it’s up to us to change the world in smaller ways, telling uplifting stories “that remind us that everything we do accrues to the good—and, inversely, that everything we don’t do lines up against us.” That is, assuming that what we do is do good in the first place, such as the young woman who, in the absence of the person employed to do the job, donned a Chuck E. Cheese costume to save the day for a young man on the spectrum who would otherwise have been shattered by a missed hug. Kasich proffers a list of 10 principles, and, within the chapters devoted to them, he sometimes offers surprises, as when he defends Colin Kaepernick for taking a knee “as a way to call attention to racial justice and oppression.” Many of Kasich’s homilies are rather pointedly Christian, but by way of Mr. Rogers and not Franklin Graham: “We need to care for each other, love each other…acknowledge each other.” We also must “get out of our silo” and start listening to each other’s points of view, quizzing our sources of news in the same way that we would test the claims of a used-car salesman, said occupation being perhaps the only one held in less esteem than that of a politician. There’s nothing objectionable about the author’s 10-point program, though some farther to the right than he might not be happy with all of his examples.
A be-nicer-to-each-other program that’s worth considering though unlikely to take shape in a time of growing division.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-335-01220-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Hanover Square Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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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