A memorable lesson in how journalists can dig out the truths beneath official lies.
A micro-history of a White House coverup, a journalist's reputation defiled and the eventual emergence of the truth.
NPR reporter Algeo (Harry Truman’s Excellent Adventure: The True Story of a Great American Road Trip, 2009, etc.) examines a slice of American history from 1893, when President Grover Cleveland disappeared from public view for about a week around the Independence Day holiday. With the nation suffering an economic depression, Cleveland and his advisors did not want to heighten the panic with the truth: The president had been diagnosed with cancer of the mouth. The president arranged for the tumor to be surgically removed by a team of physicians aboard the yacht of a friend. Cleveland's wife Frances and his press aide lied to journalists and anybody else who asked about what was occurring on the yacht. Journalists accepted the lies, and the general public believed Cleveland had undergone nothing more than uncomfortable dental work. The truth did not begin to emerge until late August, after accomplished journalist E.J. Edwards broke the story in a Philadelphia newspaper. Despite Edwards' longtime reputation as a fair and accurate reporter, other journalists, government officials and general readers believed he had concocted the account. Edwards would not receive total vindication until 1917, when one of the surgeons who assisted in the operation on the yacht published an account in the Saturday Evening Post. Algeo is a determined researcher and fine stylist, and the story of presidential illness serves as an effective connecting thread through a somewhat broader account of the United States during the hard economic times of the 1890s.
A memorable lesson in how journalists can dig out the truths beneath official lies.Pub Date: May 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-56976-350-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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
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