In his 90th year, Galbraith has produced his 31st book: a slight but enjoyable remembrance of the great, and not-so-great, he has encountered in his adventures in politics. Galbraith first came to Washington, D.C., in 1934 to serve under FDR and the New Deal. He takes us from that time, when his own liberalism and the country’s were being forged, to the end of the 1960s, when the liberal consensus, but not his own belief, had begun to fade. While betraying a certain nostalgia for that era, when much seemed possible and indeed much was accomplished, this is not a political tome. He focuses instead on the people he met and admired along the way. First and foremost in his memory is FDR, “the greatest political personality of the century.” Some he speaks of remain well known (Truman, JFK). Others have perhaps faded somewhat from memory (Adlai Stevenson, Averell Harriman). Only one true villain makes an appearance, Albert Speer, whose semi-rehabilitation still troubles Galbraith, and only two women are profiled, Eleanor Roosevelt and Jacqueline Kennedy. Galbraith brings them all to life, Speer excepted, by focusing on their humanity, foibles, and above all humor. Galbraith is a witty man and enjoys others who are so inclined, often at his own expense. “Ken,” wrote Stevenson during his 1956 presidential campaign, “I want you to write the speeches against Nixon. You have no tendency to be fair.” LBJ commented on a speech on economics Galbraith wrote: “Making a speech on ee-conomics is a lot like pissin’ down your leg. It seems hot to you, but it never does to anyone else.” Speaking to antiwar protesters outside the 1968 Democratic Convention Galbraith says, “I don’t want you fighting with these National Guardsmen Remember, they’re draft dodgers just like you.” ‘ And so it goes. There’s some criticism here, there could be more. There’s little to no mention of politicians after LBJ. But perhaps these will be part of Galbraith’ s 32nd book.
Pub Date: May 27, 1999
ISBN: 0-395-82288-2
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
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