From Dutch historian Schulte Nordholt, an evenhanded look at the 28th President. Schulte Nordholt seeks to illuminate the contradictions that made Wilson a paradox: a great President but a presidential failure. A student of the Romantic historians and an admirer of Wordsworth, Wilson, the author explains, was a disappointed poet who channeled biblical metaphors into political oratory with the ambition of becoming a statesman. As president of Princeton, Wilson gained the notice of the Democratic Party, winning the governorship of New Jersey and, in 1912, the US presidency. During his tenure in the White House, though, his hope for American neutrality in the Great War could not be maintained. Nor could the promise of his postwar Fourteen Points, designed to make the world safe from future aggression by providing a utopian world ruled by a rational League of Nations. As Schulte Nordholt shows, Wilson's idealism ran smack into the Old World's self-interest—and Wilson's own stubbornness, which led to the Senate failing to ratify the Treaty of Versailles and to American exclusion from the League of Nations. Though Schulte Nordholt does a good job in detailing Wilson's woes, he spends too much time—for American readers, at least—on digressions about Holland during Wilson's day; moreover, his writing, though well translated, occasionally trips over its own cleverness, as in his comparison of the winter of 1919 to a ``hawthorn bush in the winter dunes, stubborn and fierce, a tangle of branches, a crisscross of contradictions, of mutual division....'' Schulte Nordholt's perceptive focus on Wilson's volatile mind- set—which equated esthetics with ethics and poetics with politics- -is a refreshing change from the more familiar portraits such as August Heckscher's Woodrow Wilson (p. 909). (Sixteen pages of b&w photographs-not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 15, 1991
ISBN: 0-520-07444-0
Page Count: 575
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1991
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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
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