A solid, well-written, anecdote-filled political biography.
The story of a Cuban-American politician on the Republican fast track.
Born in 1971, Marco Antonio Rubio rose rapidly from West Miami city commissioner to Florida house speaker to his current post as junior U.S. senator from Florida. His rapid rise has led many to predict he will one day be elected president. “American politics had never seen anything like him: a young, made-for-YouTube Hispanic Republican with realistic national prospects,” writes Washington Post reporter Roig-Franzia. The author begins with the Rubio family’s arrival in the U.S. in 1956, during the last years of the Batista regime. In need of work, Rubio’s grandfather, a bartender, returned to Castro’s Cuba in 1959 and took a minor treasury post. Three years later, uneasy with Castro’s regime, he returned to Miami and became a permanent resident in 1967. Rubio grew up in Miami’s Little Havana and moved with his family to Las Vegas for several years, where he was baptized a Mormon. It was the first of several changes in his religious affiliation. Born Roman Catholic, Rubio returned to Catholicism when the family came back to Miami, where he played football in high school and studied law at the University of Miami. Later, in what his staff calls his “faith journey,” he would straddle the Baptist and Catholic faiths. Entering politics in his mid-20s, he quickly won right-wing establishment mentors, notably former Florida governor Jeb Bush. In 2009, he was saluted in a National Review cover story. Drawing on interviews, Roig-Franzia details controversies over Rubio’s credit card spending while in the Florida house, his attempts to claim a place as the son of Castro exiles, and his inspiring abilities as a public speaker. Now, writes the author, Rubio is a “cagey political veteran” whose national influence far exceeds his seniority in Congress.
A solid, well-written, anecdote-filled political biography.Pub Date: June 19, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-7545-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2012
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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