A master craftsman’s rendering of a character who needs no embellishment.
Auchincloss (Her Infinite Variety, 2000, etc.) trains his acute sensibility and elegant prose on our most colorful chief executive, rendering Teddy as a man of his time as well as a timeless example of principled leadership.
Auchincloss argues that Roosevelt’s bluster was his most human trait. The first president of the 20th century was given to loud talk and exaggeration. So what? asks the author. It masked his political shrewdness. To understand Roosevelt, one need only understand the policeman’s ethic, writes Auchincloss. Before all else, Teddy did what was right. And he enjoyed coming down hard on those who did wrong. His concept of the gentleman was tantamount to a chivalric code, right up to a man’s duty to fight for his country. Roosevelt insisted on expanding the American Navy, using its battleships on the international stage, and gladly sent his sons into WWI and WWII. He insisted on boxing with younger and stronger army officers, one of whom blinded him permanently in the left eye. Like a cop, Roosevelt was often bull-headed in his pursuit of what he thought was the right course of action. This stubbornness caused him trouble at the outset of WWI. First, Roosevelt gave the White House to the Democrats by opposing business-friendly Taft and splitting the Republicans. Then the ex-president had to put up with university professor Woodrow Wilson leading America into war. After Wilson ignored his predecessor’s request to lead a cavalry regiment against Germany—a foolish desire, given that Roosevelt had only a few more years to live—Teddy spent much of the rest of his life fulminating against the administration, one arguably more progressive than his. Auchincloss quotes extensively from Roosevelt’s writings, which are as awe-inspiring and dramatic as any novelist’s. It’s a wonderful way of bringing this giant to life on the page.
A master craftsman’s rendering of a character who needs no embellishment.Pub Date: Jan. 4, 2001
ISBN: 0-8050-6906-2
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 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.
