A solid overview for general readers.
Prizewinning journalist and Fox News political analyst Williams (Muzzled: The Assault on Honest Debate, 2011, etc.) identifies more than two dozen individuals who helped shape modern America.
In brightly written chapters detailing the lives and actions of “great men and women who forged the nation we have today,” the author traces extraordinary changes of the 20th century that would have shocked the Founding Fathers, who lived in a smaller, far different society. Members of the new “founding family,” as he calls these modern change-makers, include jurists Earl Warren and Thurgood Marshall (racial equality), economist Milton Friedman (free markets), builders Robert Moses and William Levitt (the urban and suburban landscapes), George Meany (labor), Billy Graham (the Christian right), and Henry Kissinger (diplomacy). Some sparked social-change movements through books, such as Betty Friedan (The Feminine Mystique) and Rachel Carson (Silent Spring). Others are little known, like bureaucrat Robert Ball, a longtime Social Security official who redefined and expanded that program to define health care as a fundamental right; and Harry Hay, founder of the first U.S. gay rights group. In each instance, Williams draws on secondary sources to provide a balanced view of people and issues, often noting the “for better or worse” aspects of massive societal changes, such as the rise of the National Rifle Association under actor Charlton Heston. The author’s insistence on comparing modern change-makers to the Founding Fathers, however, is a bit of a stretch. While it allows him to make effective comparisons between American life past and present, it has the effect of elevating many individuals, such as Bill Bratton, father of data-driven policing, and Gen. William Westmoreland, who helped reshape the U.S. military, to company to which they do not belong. Perhaps most interesting is Jack and Ted Kennedy’s work on 1965 immigration reform, which has literally changed the face of America. Notably absent are technology and business figures.
A solid overview for general readers.Pub Date: April 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-307-95204-2
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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