Selective but effectively tart recollections of a hectic decade as a spokesman for the Reagan and Bush administrations. When President Reagan's press secretary, Larry Speakes, left government at the start of 1987, Fitzwater, a Kansas farm boy turned government press officer, was hired away from the Treasury Department to replace him and stayed on by invitation during the Bush era. Eschewing chronology in favor of a format that allows him to probe major topics at some length, the author also forgoes recaps of the Panama invasion and Persian Gulf War (on grounds these events deserve and will get more detailed treatment in other books). He does provide anecdotal takes on the White House press corps (liberal to a fault, in his informed opinion), the awesome mechanics of daily briefings wherever in the world the president may be, a series of summit conferences (including the tempest- tossed sessions held on warships offshore Malta), and how chiefs of staff (Donald Regan, Sam Skinner, John Sununu) are sacked. Covered as well are media relations during periods when a chief executive's health commands international attention, how the fourth estate and the White house spin breaking or running stories, and the genuinely feckless reelection campaign run by Bush forces. Along his engaging way, Fitzwater (who caused a global stir when with malice aforethought he referred to Mikhail Gorbachev as a drugstore cowboy) settles some old scores with individual reporters and news- gathering organizations. Among others, he taxes Mike Wallace and William Safire for feeding ``the fires of [the Iran-Contra] scandal'' and faults Dan Rather's minions, whose ongoing enmity presumably reflected the grudge held by their boss in the wake of a 1988 confrontation with Bush on prime-time TV. In brief, then, an experienced, professional communicator's illuminating, behind-the-scenes insights on how American chief executives make and shape the news. (8 pages b&w photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-8129-2296-4
Page Count: 356
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1995
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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