Ambitious, studious portraits pulled together nicely by Darman.
An intimate chronicle of the 1,000 days after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, during which there was a sea change in the American electorate.
President Lyndon B. Johnson and Ronald Reagan both enjoyed huge election landslides, the former in his 1964 re-election bid as the standard bearer of the Great Society programs and the latter leading the conservative backlash in his defeat of Pat Brown as governor of California in 1966. In this sympathetic dual character study, former Newsweek correspondent Darman focuses on these two savvy politicians, who managed to capture the prevailing public mood and convince the voters that the best was yet to come—either for the progressive cause or the less-government-is-better platform, respectively—during a time of wrenching change in American society. Despite the prevailing shock and gloom that ensued after the assassination, LBJ, the depressed vice president largely ignored by Kennedy’s administration, was galvanized by a sense of duty and legacy, becoming the “Man-in-Motion” who effected a staggering number of progressive achievements in the spirit of the dead president: civil rights legislation, poverty alleviation and education reform, Medicare and voting rights, among others. In his accomplishments during his first 100 days of office, LBJ rivaled those of FDR. Soon after, however, everything began to unravel, sowing a sense of anxiety within the country: the racial confrontation on the Selma, Alabama, Edmund Pettus Bridge; escalation of the Vietnam War; and the Watts riots. Although LBJ had crushed Barry Goldwater, the conservatives gained new impetus in Reagan’s more appealingly packaged, moderate, yet still-hard-hitting anti-government speeches. The author masterfully conveys LBJ’s agony, as well as former actor Reagan’s free-wheeling spirit: He was the “Errol Flynn of the B movies” who had aged out of his previous roles and needed a new gig as an American hero.
Ambitious, studious portraits pulled together nicely by Darman.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6708-4
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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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