An insightful look at a complex relationship that has been largely lost to history.
The portrait of a once-famous, now nearly forgotten figure in 20th-century American politics.
Louis Howe (1871–1936) met Franklin Roosevelt in 1911, when Howe was a newspaper reporter and FDR a freshly minted New York state senator. They became fast friends, and Howe proved to be a pivotal figure in Roosevelt’s life and career. Early on he saw FDR’s enormous potential as a leader, and Roosevelt valued his frank and clear-eyed advice. American Heritage contributor Fenster (The Spirit of Invention: The Story of the Thinkers, Creators, and Dreamers Who Formed Our Nation, 2009, etc.) shows how the friendship grew in importance to both men as the years progressed, especially when FDR hit his lowest point in the 1920s. Roosevelt ran as the Democratic vice-presidential nominee in 1920 and lost; the next year, a mysterious illness (later diagnosed as polio) rendered him paralyzed from the waist down. While many considered this a career-ender, including FDR’s mother, Howe refused to give up. He devoted himself to keeping Roosevelt’s political hopes alive by meeting with potential supporters, writing editorials and attending countless meetings and conventions on FDR’s behalf as he recovered over the next two years. Howe’s devotion, Fenster effectively argues, lessened the burden on Roosevelt and helped give him the will to recover and eventually ascend to the presidency. Eleanor, too, grew close to Howe, and he gave her early advice on speechmaking and handling the press that proved invaluable; she later gained a reputation as a confident and dynamic public speaker. Plagued by lifelong poor health, Howe died of respiratory illness in 1936 during FDR’s first term. Never a man given to expressing his emotions, the president was visibly moved at Howe’s funeral, letting out a gasp and struggling to keep his composure as the casket was lowered into the ground.
An insightful look at a complex relationship that has been largely lost to history.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-230-60910-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2009
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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