The triumphs and challenges of the political arena shape an extraordinarily candid, often lyrical, memoir from former Vermont governor and current Deputy US Secretary of Education Kunin. Viewing her life through the prism of political involvement, the author, whose personal journey would seem sufficiently compelling for a more traditional narrative, instead delivers an alternately wry, intense, amusing, and elegant meditation on why anybody—from the standard male go-getter to a doctor's wife and mother of four like Kunin—would submit to the grinding pressures of public service. Born in Switzerland on the eve of Hitler's rise, Kunin, with her widowed mother and adored older brother, arrived in America at age six and gradually settled into the customary path for women of her generation, putting aside a fledgling career in journalism for marriage and family. Community and civic involvement led accidentally—and hilariously—to an unsuccessful race for the Burlington Board of Aldermen. It was the springboard for her ascent, in 12 short years, from freshman representative to first woman governor of the state. Sparing none of the gritty details of legislative infighting, the demands of juggling family and career, and the constant battle to control her ``political demons: fear, self-doubt, and paranoia,'' Kunin nevertheless conveys a passionate appreciation for the ``infinite possibility of politics,'' celebrated here as a deeply personal and simultaneously quite public art form (``...I could express my inner self in politics. Political action was a creative process, drawing on my emotions and intellect....''). Accordingly, Kunin's efforts on behalf of such cherished issues as education, the environment, child care, and women's rights are depicted as the inevitable culmination of observing of the surrounding world. Compulsory reading for anyone, male or female, who has ever pondered the mysteries of political life. (16 pages of b&w photographs—not seen)
Pub Date: March 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-41181-X
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1994
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
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