A detailed yet hardly groundbreaking rendering of a significant moment in political history.
A focused history of the period between Election Day 1960 and Inauguration Day 1961.
Market News International congressional reporter Shaw (JFK in the Senate: A Pathway to the Presidency, 2013, etc.) examines the transfer of power between Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy, “sharply contrasting political leaders” and “generational rivals.” Although the orderly transfer of power is a hallmark of American democracy, the author deems this particular transition “a fascinating mix of dutiful cooperation, petty grievances, lofty sentiments, careful organization, ad hoc improvisations, hardball politics, poignant farewells, and elevated public statements.” Eisenhower’s closing down of his administration and Kennedy’s scrambling to form a new one, though, seem not as remarkable as Shaw would have readers believe. Eisenhower was disappointed that his vice president, Richard Nixon, lost the election; he was insulted by Kennedy’s criticism of his presidency and “doubted the senator was ready to be president.” Predictably, Eisenhower felt “protective of his own legacy, ambivalent about retirement, and determined to get his affairs and those of the country in order.” Despite his misgivings about Kennedy, he oversaw a well-organized transfer of power that included two meetings in which Eisenhower apprised Kennedy of problems in Cuba and Laos. Kennedy’s transition period, on the other hand, was messy. Shuttling impetuously between his residences in Hyannis Port, Palm Beach, Washington, D.C., and Manhattan, he surrounded himself with advisers to help him select a Cabinet and huge White House staff (about 1,200 support jobs, in addition to top-level appointments), formulate a policy agenda, and write his inauguration speech. As evidence of the distinction between the two men, Shaw points to the contrast between Kennedy’s inspirational inaugural message and Eisenhower’s farewell speech, in which he warned Americans to be wary of the military-industrial complex. The author prefaces his chronicle of the transition with familiar biographical background of the protagonists and accounts of Nixon’s failed campaign, election-night tensions, Eisenhower’s achievements, and Kennedy’s senatorial record.
A detailed yet hardly groundbreaking rendering of a significant moment in political history.Pub Date: May 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68177-732-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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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