In just 150 pages, Zelizer manages to effectively analyze how Carter’s personality has led him to both failure and success.
Zelizer (History and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.; Arsenal of Democracy: The Politics of National Security—From World War II to the War on Terrorism, 2009, etc.) insightfully examines the 39th president.
Jimmy Carter’s presidency, from 1977 to 1981, is often portrayed by historians as a failure. In this brief biography, the author acknowledges Carter’s shortcomings as president, but he points out the largely forgotten fact that he was enormously popular during his first year in office. With the Watergate scandal still fresh, the American people were looking for a change, an anti-Nixon; in many ways, Carter fit the bill perfectly. Carter’s outsider status—he was a relatively young governor of Georgia, untainted by national politics—worked to his advantage, particularly during his presidential campaign. He was a moderate but idealistic Democrat who was uncomfortable with ideological labels, and was willing to take on the establishment to do what he thought was right. But some of these very same qualities worked against Carter when he took office. He often found it difficult to compromise and struggled to muster the support of his own fractious Democratic Party, let alone Republicans. At the same time, the seemingly intractable hostage crisis in Iran, soaring oil prices and the troubled economy would have presented huge challenges to any president. Zelizer points out that although his few major achievements in office were impressive—in particular, the brokering of a peace between Egypt and Israel and the creation of a comprehensive, conservation-based national energy policy—Carter’s style of antiestablishment leadership simply didn’t translate well to Washington, resulting in a chronic inability to get things done. But once he left office, his fearless determination to do the right thing led to his greatest successes: in particular, his founding of the Carter Center, an independent diplomatic institution that has successfully monitored elections around the world, and his charitable work building houses with Habitat for Humanity.
In just 150 pages, Zelizer manages to effectively analyze how Carter’s personality has led him to both failure and success.Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-8050-8957-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2010
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
