Breezy reflections from a political veteran who thinks government can still work. In this brief book, assisted by Sussman (What Americans Really Think, 1988, etc.), former US senator and Connecticut governor Weicker offers a grab bag of frank reminiscences from a long career. He defends the integrity of most politicians, though he regrets that ``we have gone from a politics of accountability to a politics of reelectability.'' Weicker rose quickly in politics as a Republican: from Greenwich first selectman to the state legislature to one term in the House of Representatives before entering the Senate in 1971 at age 39. Weicker served notably on the Senate Watergate Committee, making powerful statements of patriotism and saying his own party should be above ``these illegal, unconstitutional and gross acts.'' A deep-sea diver, Weicker then became alerted to our underdeveloped oceans policy and met with Fidel Castro about the issue, which led to harassment from Miami's right-wing Cuban community; Weicker disparages politicians for letting that small corps shape our stance on Cuba. He also recalls fighting right-wing senators on school prayer and abortion, and damning Reagan budgets. Though Weicker's instincts on public health issues are good, he's a little self-congratulatory in assessing the congressional fight against AIDS and the effects of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Weicker lost his Senate seat in 1988 and returned to Connecticut as governor in 1991, bravely fighting for a much-needed state income tax. Though Weicker's analysis of the future of third-party politics is sketchy, he rightly warns that national budget reform requires us to recognize that ``we have welfare for middle-income America.'' And, he adds, ``compassion is really an enlightened form of self-interest.'' Disjointed, but a good antidote to the Gingrichian vision.
Pub Date: June 7, 1995
ISBN: 0-316-92814-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1995
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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