More than serviceable, but best for readers of conservative views themselves. Others will want to turn to more critical...
An admiring biography of the Iron Lady by a former “Tory back-bencher” who played a role in her government.
Admiring it is, but Aitken’s (Pride and Perjury: An Autobiography, 2003, etc.) life of Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) is not entirely uncritical, even if he finds reasons to excuse behavior that left “bullied colleagues, derided officials, ignored communities and neglected family members” in its wake. Thatcher, writes the author, was ambitious from the very start, running into trouble with a headmistress for having had the upstart hubris to declare that she was aiming for a career in the Indian Foreign Service, since it was a fast track to political fame back home. Alas for Thatcher, India got away from Britain before she could hitch her wagon to it, and so she had to slog it out with the rest of the back bench. Mainly, Aitken writes with the exquisite carefulness of the true believer: “Although Denis’s proposal was accepted by Margaret with the full consent of her parents, the engagement was kept secret for another five weeks for political reasons.” Those political reasons, it seems, were so profound that they occasioned this doubly passive construction. In the tightest of controversies, Aitken accords Thatcher some responsibility for bad faith but places more on others: Breaking the unions in the early 1980s was mostly the fault of militant union leaders, even if Thatcher could have done better; the Falklands War was mostly the fault of the Argentines, even if her “stubbornness…and her inexperience in foreign affairs” had something to do with the mess. But mostly, Aitken is deferential and even a little star-struck, especially in the presence of Ronald Reagan, he of “good looks, good humour and good conservative views.”
More than serviceable, but best for readers of conservative views themselves. Others will want to turn to more critical commentators.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-62040-342-6
Page Count: 784
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2013
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 2025 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.
