Readers on this side of the pond who are puzzled by the impassioned esteem and disdain in which Thatcher is held in Britain...
Britain’s storied Iron Lady comes in for a largely positive but not uncritical reassessment from a Conservative Member of Parliament.
Kwarteng (War and Gold: A Five-Hundred-Year History of Empires, Adventures, and Debt, 2014, etc.), who represents the historically conservative constituency of Spelthorne, may offend one or two die-hard admirers of Margaret Thatcher (1925-2013) with his careful qualifications: yes, she was a true-blue scourger of socialism and the welfare state, but she was defined by a largely negative program of what she was against. Yes, she had strongly held beliefs and remained true to her cause, but she was doctrinaire and an ideologue. More than anything else, she had an “almost preternatural ability to divide opinion,” such that few were undecided or neutral on the matter of Margaret Thatcher. Much of Kwarteng’s look at the end of Thatcher’s first term in office is a balanced assessment. She was, more than any other prime minister in modern British history, open to discussion and even dissent on the part of her Cabinet, and she thrived on confrontation and debate—“provided, of course, that she prevailed.” Occasionally, the author gives away more than he intends to: Thatcher, he writes, was a radical from the beginning, and her “quasi-revolutionary fervor” was deeply shocking to the established order on both left and right. One senses mild disapproval though not disavowal on Kwarteng’s part as he steers the narrative through purges of that Cabinet and the government, union-busting and strike-breaking, dismantling of various parts of the social safety net, and neo-imperialist adventuring—all of which took place in the last part of 1982 and first part of 1983, when Thatcher would profoundly remake the Conservative Party and be rewarded for it with a sweeping re-election victory.
Readers on this side of the pond who are puzzled by the impassioned esteem and disdain in which Thatcher is held in Britain will find much of value in this short but illuminating study.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-61039-562-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2015
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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