An entertaining retelling of a forgotten story, written for political junkies who enjoy the naughty and the nice.
A journalist and the CEO of an education advisory company unite to tell the story of the famous first cousins who occupied very different positions on the continuum of political belief.
Former Newsweek and Budget Travel deputy editor Peyser and School Choice International CEO Dwyer have quite a story to tell, one that drips with the intrigue of political power and the venom of personal jealousy, copious tears, regret, loss and betrayal. The more famous of the Roosevelt cousins (now and then) is, if course, Eleanor (1884-1962), who married FDR, tolerated his various romantic liaisons, helped with the treatment of his polio and outlived him to become a liberal icon. Alice (1884-1980), a daughter of Theodore Roosevelt, was friendly and affectionate with Eleanor early on, but they both flirted with Franklin, and the more attractive Alice did not take the loss lightly. Though she married Nick Longworth, Alice remained as sexually frisky, and otherwise mischievous, as a libidinous teen, engaging in multiple affairs over the years. Alice also was “ever the guttersnipe,” write the authors, who seem sometimes uncertain of their ultimate opinion of her: Was she a jerk? An opportunist? A happy hedonist? When FDR began his rise, Alice was not aboard. She planted herself firmly on the other side, as a moderately popular newspaper columnist and a highly quotable critic. (Readers might imagine an Ann Coulter with more self-restraint.) The authors’ admiration for Eleanor is patent, and they fully chronicle her human rights advocacy, her tireless travel to experience the lives of others, her prodding of FDR to do something about civil rights and her own popularity (far beyond Alice’s) as a newspaper columnist. The authors, understandably, have occasional trouble shoving aside the looming men to let us see the women.
An entertaining retelling of a forgotten story, written for political junkies who enjoy the naughty and the nice.Pub Date: March 31, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53601-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Jan. 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2015
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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