A poignant sketch of a lost champion of social justice from an age when it could still be said that "politics is still the...
Freelance reporter and TV news producer Bohrer debuts with an inquiry into the transformation of Robert F. Kennedy (1925-1968) from hard-nosed political operative to inspirational presidential candidate.
When John F. Kennedy was murdered in 1963, his brother Robert had never held elective office, nor seemed likely to. As JFK's campaign manager and later as attorney general, he stepped on many toes and made few friends; the word most often used to describe him was "ruthless." Grief-stricken and increasingly marginalized by a paranoid Lyndon Johnson, RFK was profoundly uncertain about his future. After a desultory quest for the 1964 vice-presidential nomination was vetoed by Johnson, he won a Senate seat in New York and began building a national constituency around a radical social welfare program and skepticism about the administration's Vietnam policy. Growing up in wealth and privilege, he had had little experience with the effects of racism and poverty; as a senator, his efforts to advance his brother's civil rights legacy led him to a wholehearted embrace of their victims in contentious and even dangerous circumstances. To young people, especially, he began speaking passionately of a "revolution now in progress," peaceful if possible, but demanding advances in individual dignity and in economic and political freedom. Bohrer presents this thorough and well-researched narrative in an evenhanded style, leaving evaluation of this still-controversial politician to readers. Oddly, he ends his story in early 1966, two years before RFK definitively broke with Johnson, running a long-shot presidential campaign that ended with Kennedy's assassination; the implication is that Kennedy's political transformation was complete by this time and all that followed was merely consequential. The author also leaves it to readers to ponder the continuing relevance of this long-dead senator who stood for many as "a bridge for a country that was tearing apart."
A poignant sketch of a lost champion of social justice from an age when it could still be said that "politics is still the greatest and most honorable adventure."Pub Date: June 6, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-60819-964-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
