by Nick Littlefield & David Nexon ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 10, 2015
Readers willing to accept this book as more than hagiography will find a penetrating exploration of how the legislative...
Through the story of Ted Kennedy (1932-2009), the authors deliver a primer on how the governmental sausage was made not so long ago.
When the Republicans took over Congress in the wake of the 1994 midterm elections, most savvy political observers assumed it meant the death knell of President Bill Clinton’s domestic agenda and possibly of his presidency. However, Kennedy was among the Democrats unwilling simply to roll over for Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America.” Instead, Kennedy used his grasp of the congressional process, his interpersonal relationships across the aisle, and his tenacity to fight to forestall, moderate, and ameliorate the Republican governing agenda, emerging in the process with a few of his own legislative goals intact. In this book, readers receive an inside glimpse at how politics happen, especially from the vantage point of the minority party. The narrative comes primarily from the perspective of Littlefield, Kennedy’s longtime aid and chief domestic policy adviser. His copious notes from his own involvement in these events drive the text, and he wrote the book until he fell seriously ill and Nexon, Kennedy’s senior health policy adviser, stepped in to complete the project. The authors provide a fine rendering that deserves a wide readership, but in this age of heightened partisanship and ideology, it likely won’t reach much beyond a Democratic audience, especially because the portrait they paint of Kennedy is so laudatory. This is an indictment of our age, not of this book, which admires its subject but also takes its topic, the political process, seriously. Littlefield and Nexon reveal a man unafraid of fights but also one willing and able to reach across the aisle to colleagues who often opposed him but nearly universally respected him.
Readers willing to accept this book as more than hagiography will find a penetrating exploration of how the legislative process works—or at least worked in the recent past.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4767-9615-4
Page Count: 484
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2015
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
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
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by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996
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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