Not only a lively history of an extraordinary clan, but a perceptive analysis of the clash between loyalty and ambition in...
A readable and informative appraisal of the relationships among the Roosevelt cousins—close in the early years but increasingly strained by conflicting political ambitions and jealousies as FDR became the heir to TR’s progressive political legacy.
In the Middle Ages, the deteriorating relations between the Oyster Bay and Hyde Park Roosevelts would soon have escalated into bloody feuds, but, as Donn (Freud and Jung, not reviewed) vividly details, both factions’ skillful use of the media was no less lethal. She begins her story in 1884, the year Alice Longworth Roosevelt was born to Teddy Roosevelt and Eleanor to TR’s younger brother Elliott. The two were very close as children and teenagers, and Eleanor was TR’s favorite niece as well. Donn details the close-knit childhoods of Oyster Bay and Hyde Park, FDR’s and Eleanor’s courtship and marriage, and Alice’s unhappy marriage to Nicholas Longworth, and then traces the estrangement of the cousins as adults. When TR formed the New Progressive party in 1912 and ran as its candidate for President, Alice in particular felt betrayed by Eleanor’s and FDR’s endorsement of the popular Woodrow Wilson rather than his lackluster opponent as the Democratic candidate. After TR’s death in 1918, his family were even more outraged when his eldest son Ted was selected as the Republican candidate for governor of New York in 1924, and Eleanor not only seconded the Democratic choice but also, mindful that Ted had been falsely accused of involvement in the Teapot Dome scandal, had a mock teapot built on a car she parked wherever he was speaking. The battle lines, once drawn, would harden in the years to come as Alice regaled the press with her often vitriolic critiques of Eleanor and Franklin.
Not only a lively history of an extraordinary clan, but a perceptive analysis of the clash between loyalty and ambition in an epic family drama played out in the public eye. (110 illustrations)Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2001
ISBN: 0-679-44637-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2001
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
