Capably written and argued, though only the future will tell whether the elegy for the Republican establishment is premature.
A thoughtful political biography of two dynasts of a now-receding generation of politicians.
The title of historian/journalist Updegrove’s (Indomitable Will: LBJ in the Presidency, 2012, etc.) latest comes from George W. Bush’s well-documented lament that the rise of Donald Trump meant that he and his father would be the last “real” Republicans to hold the White House. That worry, suggests the author, is well-founded; by his account, the Bushes are definitively establishment figures who, while of much different styles, represented the virtues of prudence, civility, and bipartisanship as leaders of a party that has lately “placed ideological purity over pragmatism and compromise in governance.” George W. claims that his brother Jeb’s primary defeat at Trump’s hands was the result of anger stemming from “a moribund economy.” If the anger seems more free-floating and less directed than all that, it certainly would seem that disdain marked Jeb’s trouncing in an arena that by all rights he should have dominated. Updegrove discusses the advantages and disadvantages of being a member of a political dynasty in a time when voters seem mistrustful of them—and Trump, he observes, upended two of them, the Bushes and the Clintons—noting that still other Bushes are waiting in the wings for their turns. In the main, this is a solid examination of how the Bushes behaved while in office, the one patrician and the other homespun, the latter much more certain of the righteousness of his cause even after being told by his own mother that he would not prevail in his first run for public office. (“True story,” he shrugged, though Barb proved to be wrong.) In the end, George H.W. emerges as a bit warmer and less wooden than he might have seemed during his term as president, while George W. emerges as somewhat more substantial than he is often depicted as being.
Capably written and argued, though only the future will tell whether the elegy for the Republican establishment is premature.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-265412-0
Page Count: 484
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2017
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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