Lauding the Senate as a tool of moderation and wise counsel is one thing, behaving moderately and wisely another. More...
The Senate majority leader bares all—well, at least his fangs—in this account of a long career on Capitol Hill.
The long game: it’s a metaphor for life as well as politics. If one were not aware of McConnell’s actual performance in office, this modest memoir would be a source of Solomonic wisdom for politicians and good citizens everywhere—as, for example, when he details his opposition to a flag-burning amendment to the nation’s founding document, arguing that “no act of speech is so obnoxious that it merits tampering with the First Amendment,” and as when he urges bipartisanship, saying, “I believe that consensus among bitterly disputing parties is not only possible but a necessary condition for the tranquil flourishing we aspire to as a people.” Deliberative moments of this sort are fewer, though, than score-settling and scattershot complaints. Allowing that he’s usually portrayed as the villain of the piece, he has scarcely typed his name before lighting into his Democratic counterpart, Harry Reid, under whose leadership “the Senate Chamber frequently became little more than a Democratic campaign studio.” Thus it has always been, and thus it is now, but no matter: McConnell goes on to rehearse lengthily his hatred of the Affordable Care Act and fury over the party-line vote that brought it about, to say nothing of his dislike for the president and the “march of the Left” generally. Even with its affecting glimpses into real life—his overcoming polio as a child, for instance—McConnell’s book is too much an exercise in finger-pointing: the Democrats are “more rigorous about enforcing a rigid ideological code than Republicans,” those who opposed the Iraq War were “reckless,” and so forth.
Lauding the Senate as a tool of moderation and wise counsel is one thing, behaving moderately and wisely another. More examples of such exemplary conduct would have been welcome in the place of the litany of grumbles.Pub Date: May 31, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-399-56410-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Sentinel
Review Posted Online: June 8, 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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
