It would roil Butler's immense ego to learn that—not 60 years after his death—this well-crafted study is even necessary.
A highly readable exhumation of the career of Nicholas Murray Butler, president of the Carnegie Endowment and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and almost entirely forgotten today.
Once upon a time in America, the opinions and prescriptions of college presidents seriously mattered. To the list of Harvard's Eliot, Princeton's Wilson and Chicago's Hutchins, add Columbia's Butler, who over the course of four decades transformed a provincial college in Morningside Heights into a world-class university. Rosenthal (English/Columbia Univ.) admirably chronicles this achievement, while at the same time exposing Butler's thinly veiled anti-Semitism, his overblown reputation as a fundraiser and his autocratic governance, which stifled all student dissent and drove off not a few fine faculty members. Hugely ambitious, hen-pecked and emotionally guarded, Butler appears truly to have loved only his daughter more than himself and the school he came to embody. From Columbia's bully pulpit and through an admixture of relentless self-promotion, friendships with great men (Carnegie, Teddy Roosevelt) and some genuine political talent of his own, Butler emerged as the model of conventional wisdom among the Republican, WASP, internationalist establishment of the first half of the 20th century. A caricature of Samuel Johnson's clubbable man (Butler's honors, awards, memberships and associations were endless), he helped shape his party's direction and the country's agenda. Most notably, through his promotion of the Kellogg-Briand Pact, he nudged the world. When the applause subsided, however, almost all his exertions outside the kingdom of Columbia amounted to little. Rosenthal shines in demonstrating how the winner of so many of life's glittering prizes should end up, for the most part, an index entry in the biographies of greater men.
It would roil Butler's immense ego to learn that—not 60 years after his death—this well-crafted study is even necessary.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-374-29994-3
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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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