A trenchant philosophical essay reminiscent of the best of Garry Wills; smart moralizing in a time governed by its archly...
A study of three intersecting political lives in the annus mirabilis of 1948, when Richard Nixon, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson “committed themselves to a mature and focused political ruthlessness.”
That year, writes award-winning Time columnist Morrow (Evil, 2003, etc.), marked crises for each. Having been through WWII, each in his own way, the three were ready for more than the kind of qualified readmission to society promised in the emblematic film The Best Years of Their Lives, from which Morrow borrows his title. They sensed that destiny had come a-calling after their “formative ordeals”: As if reborn, they took on knightly errands. Nixon earned his first measure of fame in the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings of 1948–50, far and away the most intelligent of all those who served that dubious cause. Johnson was employing hitherto unknown dirty tricks, to say nothing of presciently media-savvy electoral techniques, to defeat a popular Texas governor in his run for the Senate. Kennedy fended off the onset of Addison’s disease while chasing bevies of beauties until his powerful father ordered him to make good and take public office. The three Washington newcomers were friends; astoundingly, Kennedy was also friendly with Joseph McCarthy and loyal to his fellow freshman to the last. They also had many failings in common, and Morrow attributes to each of the future presidents a personality disorder—paranoia in Nixon’s and Johnson’s cases, and something like a lack of moral sanity in Kennedy’s. As his story progresses, though he never loses sight of his immediate subject, Morrow turns more and more toward a meditation on an American golden age gone suddenly bad, arriving finally at a novel moral inventory of each politician: Nixon’s “defining deadly sin was surely anger,” for instance, whereas Johnson’s was greed; Johnson’s virtue was to turn that greed to social good, while Kennedy’s virtue was courage, and so on.
A trenchant philosophical essay reminiscent of the best of Garry Wills; smart moralizing in a time governed by its archly stupid variant.Pub Date: April 5, 2010
ISBN: 0-465-04723-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2005
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
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