A fairly straightforward, rueful memoir in which the author achieves frank self-acceptance.
The son of recently deceased Sargent Shriver and Eunice Kennedy Shriver reflects on his father’s towering achievements.
Being the son of JFK’s right arm who first organized and led the Peace Corps, orchestrated LBJ’s War on Poverty and ran for president in 1976, Shriver struggled mightily his whole life under the shadow of a benevolent, famous father, portrayed here as nearly saintly in his Catholic faith and sense of humanitarian mission. A native of Westminster, Md., the elder Shriver served in World War II, attended Yale and started his law career in Chicago. He became a junior editor at Newsweek, where a felicitous contact with Joe Kennedy got him hired to run Kennedy’s Merchandise Mart in Chicago; he eventually married Kennedy’s daughter, Eunice. Jack Kennedy and Sargent Shriver had known each other back at the Canterbury School, and Shriver was soon enlisted to aid Kennedy’s campaigns and garner the talent for Kennedy’s “best and brightest” Cabinet. A peacemaker, statesman, friend of the Church and head of the Special Olympics (founded by Eunice Kennedy), “Sarge” was a hard act to follow. His slipping into Alzheimer’s during his last years strained the relationship between father and son, who was serving in the Maryland legislature and ultimately lost his 2002 race for Congress, yet also transformed and deepened the son’s appreciation of his father’s accomplishments and his own shortcomings. Keeping up with the Kennedys is a major theme in the book, since the Shriver clan spent the holidays at Hyannis Port with the slew of Kennedy relatives and cousins.
A fairly straightforward, rueful memoir in which the author achieves frank self-acceptance.Pub Date: June 5, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9530-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: March 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 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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