Cooper exhibits complete command of his materials, a sure knowledge of the man and a nuanced understanding of a presidency...
A noted Woodrow Wilson expert comprehensively examines the life and career of America’s 28th president.
Generally acknowledged among the country’s great presidents, Wilson’s proper placement within the pantheon nevertheless creates more argument among scholars than perhaps any other. While acknowledging Wilson’s dismal record on race and civil liberties, Cooper (History/Univ. of Wisconsin; Reconsidering Woodrow Wilson, 2008, etc.) comes down firmly on the president’s side, rejecting the caricature of the high-minded intellectual out of his depth in the messy political arena. The author believes, as Wilson himself did, that his academic background—first as an exceedingly popular professor, then as Princeton’s reform-minded president—prepared him perfectly for the political battles he later faced as New Jersey’s governor and, of course, as president. Above all, Cooper stresses, Wilson was a teacher, his goal not so much to inspire the American people in the fashion of his greatest rival, Teddy Roosevelt, but rather to educate them, appealing to public opinion through his writing and oratory. Domestically, he enacted progressive legislation that prefigured some of the New Deal. After maneuvering to keep the country neutral during World War I—he was narrowly reelected on the slogan, “He kept us out of war”—Wilson proved a surprisingly energetic commander in chief. By the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, he was arguably the world’s most acclaimed leader, but from there his presidency turned tragic. In part because of his disinclination to compromise, but largely because of a debilitating stroke that literally paralyzed his last year and a half in office, Wilson failed to persuade Congress to ratify the Treaty of Versailles or to join the League of Nations. Cooper is especially good on this “worst crisis of presidential disability in American history”; Wilson’s uncommonly close attachment to the women in his life; his Civil War–era boyhood in Virginia; the battle for educational reform at Princeton; and the role played by important presidential advisors like Joe Tumulty and Colonel House.
Cooper exhibits complete command of his materials, a sure knowledge of the man and a nuanced understanding of a presidency almost Shakespearean in its dimensions.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-307-26541-8
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2009
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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