Two-time Pulitzer-winner Reston (Reston's Washington, 1986, etc.) recalls with verve and good humor his life and times, including 50 years as reporter, Washington bureau chief, executive editor, and columnist for The New York Times. Now a retired octogenarian, Reston offers an almost classic immigrant's success story. After coming to the US from Scotland with his devoutly Calvinist parents, the young ``Scotty'' caught the eye of Ohio Governor James Cox while caddying and was helped through college by this former Democratic presidential nominee. Thereafter, his rise was steady but sure: Cincinnati Reds publicist, AP sportswriter, then his legendary tenure at the Times, where his politically mainstream column became required Washington reading for several decades. Save for final chapters when he mounts the pulpit to expound on how the world has changed in his lifetime, the worst quality of the column—its omniscient tone—is refreshingly absent from the bright, informal prose here (Ronald Reagan ``announced when he arrived that it was morning in America, but he didn't like to get out of bed''). The longtime Washington press-corps dean sheds little light on the convulsive internal struggles at the Times (including his year as executive editor) recounted in Harrison Salisbury's Without Fear or Favor and Gay Talese's The Kingdom and the Power, but provides affectionate, often compassionate, portraits of journalist colleagues Arthur Krock and Walter Lippmann, heavyweight politicians and statesmen (Dean Acheson, Arthur Vandenberg, and ``favorite loser'' Adlai Stevenson), and Presidents (the account of a 40-minute telephone harangue from LBJ is a comic classic). Remembering a life and tumultuous century in tranquillity, Reston resists gossip, the occupational hazard of journalists. Instead, he offers an engaging ``love story about America and other impossible dreams.'' (Eight pages of b&w photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Oct. 8, 1991
ISBN: 0-394-58558-5
Page Count: 452
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1991
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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