MacPherson is fearless herself in considering such contradictions as a muckraking millionaire, delivering a welcome and...
“I don’t think the primary job of a free journalist in a free society is digging out the dirt. . . . The primary job is not to disgrace anybody or defame them, but to provide understanding.”
So said the fearless journalist Isador Feinstein Stone (1907–89), “Izzy” to his friends. Throughout his long life, writes MacPherson (She Came to Live Out Loud, 1999, etc.), Stone had fewer friends than enemies. He was hired as a newsman at the tender age of 15, thanks to a friendship with a wealthy patron that began over a smart-alecky remark and a volume of Spinoza; his devotion to the classics and fierce repartee would become lifelong trademarks. Stone went on to write for a range of liberal publications, including the short-lived PM, traveling illegally with Holocaust survivors to Palestine, later confounding his admirers by reporting on Palestinians displaced by the newcomers. He attained greater renown in the 1950s, when he tangled with Joe McCarthy, HUAC and Richard Nixon and was tagged a Communist for his troubles; MacPherson takes pains to refute the charge that Stone was a Soviet spy, reserving special scorn for Ann Coulter, “the Queen of Sleaze,” for reviving it recently. Stone was, of course, squarely on the left, though, in what he called the “time of torment” of Vietnam; he alienated New Leftists by his insistence on working within the system and by scorning protestors who used “such antics as displaying Vietcong flags, disrupting courtrooms, shouting obscenities and other obnoxious patterns of conduct.” (A niece of his, Weather Underground figure Kathy Boudin, would serve 22 years in prison for murder.) Proved right about official lies concerning Vietnam, Watergate and kindred matters, Stone gained enough readers of his famed Weekly to make him rich in old age—and something of an Establishment figure.
MacPherson is fearless herself in considering such contradictions as a muckraking millionaire, delivering a welcome and readable study of the influential journalist, ever missed.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-684-80713-0
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2006
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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