Fourth and below-par volume of Davis's ongoing biography of FDR (1986, etc.), this entry covering 1936-40. Davis presents an uncomplimentary view of FDR's second term, seeing the unprecedented electoral victory of 1936 as having created a disastrous hubris in the President, and he presses this thesis in a long opening section on FDR's attempt to enlarge a conservative Supreme Court that had frustrated New Deal legislation. Section titles suggest both Davis's views and his wordy, rhetorical writing: ``Initiation and Anatomy of a Tragic Error''; ``Tragic Error is Compounded by a Stubborn Persistence in It,'' etc. FDR's waffling on the Spanish Civil War, his running battle with Supreme Court chief justice Charles Evans Hughes, and the recession of 1937 are well presented, but the President's mistakes and sometimes vindictive treatment of political enemies are covered with insufficient consideration of the fragility of FDR's political coalition, the resurgent strength of the financial/industrial establishment, and the inevitable letdown of second terms. And Davis's claim to understand the interior world of this sophisticated patrician and wily statesman doesn't wash: A statement like ``[FDR's] mandate was not only popular, it was also, in his own perception, divine...'' doesn't really help us to grasp Roosevelt. Moreover, the context (i.e., national catastrophe) isn't fully present; if Roosevelt overreached, he did so with unique support from the people. Balance demands that FDR be explained as more than a politician who did ``nothing save drift with the tide of circumstances,'' lacked both decisiveness about the atom bomb and the ability to accomplish what he wished in foreign affairs, and convinced himself that God was telling him what to do. Somehow the electorate accepted FDR's version of reality: Hitler was confronted, Lindbergh was faced down, the Court was tamed, destroyers got to England, and the Bomb was built. The means by which all this occurred are not explained here.
Pub Date: March 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-679-41541-6
Page Count: 736
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1992
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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