Still, for the moment it’s the most complete life yet of the man, and though it will at turns puzzle both fans and...
An overblown (and this is but the first volume, ending with the crushing defeat of Bush I), often out of tune, but oddly fascinating account of William Jefferson Clinton’s pre–White House life and career.
Hamilton, a British biographer (JFK: Reckless Youth, 1992, etc.) writing for a British audience (whence words like “podgy” and “gramophone”), seems uncertain about whether to scorn Billy Blythe (for so Clinton was born) as colonial white trash or to admire him for his many and evident gifts, and so his long narrative lurches between the poles of condemnation and approbation. Hamilton is also maddeningly given to sweeping psychologizing: young Bill Clinton, as he became along about August 1962 with his bohemian mother’s remarriage, was drawn to politics out of psychic necessity, born of the need to please and be loved, maybe to prove the schoolyard bullies wrong; he was shaped in equal measure by the Bible-solid town of Hope and the iniquitous den of Warm Springs; and so on. As grudging in his praise as Sidney Blumenthal is lavish, Hamilton nonetheless gives Clinton high marks for hard work, intellectual brilliance, mastery of political skills, and, well, persistence in overcoming, through charm or plain steamrolling, just about anyone who stood in his path. Along the way, Hamilton turns in any number of juicy, telling anecdotes: while at Oxford, for instance, Clinton offers his telephone number to the visiting firebrand Germaine Greer, “in case you ever decide to give bourgeois men another chance.” Hamilton also offers a refreshing outsider’s perspective on several issues that have divided American commentators, wisely observing that almost no politician of Clinton’s generation has clean hands on the matter of Vietnam (though he chides Clinton for not having lived up to his ROTC contract) and hinting that Clinton’s sexual drive should not particularly bother grownups (though the endless lying should). Yet Hamilton also scoops up innuendo, mostly on matters sexual, that will make serious students of the Clinton era cringe.
Still, for the moment it’s the most complete life yet of the man, and though it will at turns puzzle both fans and detractors of Clinton and his legacy, it’s well worth reading for all concerned.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-50610-1
Page Count: 736
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2003
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 2025 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.
