This eye-opening biography, drawing from rich behind-the-scenes knowledge, is necessary reading for anyone who wants to...
A biography of German Chancellor Angela Merkel (b. 1954) that provides insight and clarity into Germany's often underreported role in shaping the European political landscape.
In his retelling of the trajectory of Merkel's career path, Qvortrup (Political Science/Coventry Univ.) highlights differences in cross-Atlantic political culture in ways no news account can. The daughter of a Lutheran minister in communist East Germany, Merkel was a prizewinning student in mathematics and languages who went on to complete a doctorate in quantum chemistry. Only with the collapse of communism and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 did she enter the political arena. Her rise to political prominence was rapid and dramatic. As an emerging politician in the East, she won sponsorship from leaders in the West, among them Helmut Kohl, who served as chancellor from 1982 to 1998. Male chauvinist opponents derisively called her “Kohl's little girl,” but they learned one among many such lessons when she successfully overthrew Kohl as party leader in a corruption scandal. Qvortrup makes clear that the qualities of character she brought to bear were significant; her rise was not just a result of the good fortune of being in the right place at the right time or knowing the right people. As chancellor, the author demonstrates, Merkel has shown a meticulous attention to detail and “obsession with getting the facts right” that can be traced back to her childhood: when she was 9, her motto was “never show incompetence.” Merkel combined those qualities with ruthless courage in seizing opportunities as she became head of her party and then the government. Consolidating power in Europe's strongest country, she also became the continent's major political leader. Qvortrup outlines both the depth and flexibility of a mind and character unbound by the limits of ideology.
This eye-opening biography, drawing from rich behind-the-scenes knowledge, is necessary reading for anyone who wants to broaden his or her perspective on the world today.Pub Date: July 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4683-1316-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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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