A quiet but compelling case for working in policy research and advocacy.
A dedicated public servant recounts his bicoastal career working in European security, economic policy, education, and other arenas.
Born to Yiddish-speaking immigrants in Buffalo, Yochelson, the founder and president of Building Engineering and Science Talent, was 17 when he heard John F. Kennedy’s 1961 inaugural exhortation to “ask what you can do for your country." He begins his patient memoir with this anecdote to underscore that at the time, the best and the brightest were attracted to public service; “surrounded by strivers,” Yochelson wanted to be “a striver too.” His experiences at prestigious schools, from Yale (which included a year abroad in France) to Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School, equipped him with the education for government service, derailed temporarily by his entrance in the Army in 1966. He was sure to be sent to Vietnam yet loath to shirk his duty, a feeling made stronger by the fact that his father and uncles had served during World War II. Sent to Germany on his father’s connections instead, he “felt like a hothouse plant” in comparison to others who had seen active duty in Vietnam. His facility with the French language helped him win the plum assignment of writing a monograph for Jean Monnet, architect of post-1945 integration, followed by a fellowship at the Brookings Institute. Successive posts took him to the Center for International Affairs, in Boston; the State Department, in Washington, D.C. (he worked in Western European security at the time Henry Kissinger was secretary); and Georgetown University’s Center for Strategic and International Studies, where he raised funds and managed relations with VIPs. As his career “topped out,” Yochelson moved with his family to San Diego to raise money for uncovering minority and women of talent for BEST in 2001. In the final chapter, the author composes a fictional letter to the president-elect on how to reshape the current civil service framework.
A quiet but compelling case for working in policy research and advocacy.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-61234-824-7
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Potomac Books
Review Posted Online: May 3, 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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