It's hard to write a bad biography of Churchill but even harder to find something new to say, and historian Rose (Hebrew Univ., Israel) doesn't find much. He is, however, particularly good on his subject's personality: ``Of course I am an egotist,'' Churchill once told Clement Attlee. ``Where do you get if you aren't?'' Self-centered, frequently bombastic, living in great houses, surrounded by masses of servants, he was saved from some of the worst effects of this self-indulgence by his sense of humor: When his faithful assistant, Eddie Marsh, told him that he favored ``kissing [Uncle Sam] on both cheeks,'' Churchill replied, ``But not on all four.'' Rose is also perceptive on the politician's relationship with his wife, Clementine, which was somewhat more complicated than is usually supposed. While it was a love match, both sometimes felt the need to get away from each other, and her judgment, both political and personal, was frequently better than his. On some substantive matters, Rose is neglectful of recent research, offering less than satisfactory coverage of Churchill's role as a social reformer, his choice of the Board of Trade as his first Cabinet post, his more intricate political calculations, and his success in becoming more acceptable to the Labor Party before WW II—about which a number of authors have written well in the past few years. The last omission in particular leads the author to make an assertion that would be rejected by many historians of the period, namely that the Earl of Halifax could have become prime minister in 1940 if he had wanted to. Rose responds persuasively, however, to the recent charge that Churchill ruined Britain by refusing to make a compromise peace with Hitler, a suggestion that depends on a reliability that Hitler was never inclined to demonstrate. Sifts the old soil quite pleasantly, but doesn't break new ground. (30 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Aug. 16, 1995
ISBN: 0-02-874009-2
Page Count: 450
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1995
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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