A mighty—and mighty trying—soul, very capably and vigorously scrutinized here.
Teddy Roosevelt did not go gently into the good night of postpresidential politics; rather, writes O’Toole, he made as much of a stir out of office as in it, and “the last decade of his life would blind him to distinctions between the public interest and his own.”
No law forbade Roosevelt’s running for a third term in 1908, notes O’Toole (Money and Morals in America, 1998), but custom prevented it; indeed, the two-term limit had been “a sacred American precept” since the time of George Washington, who warned that a president entrenched in office too long would become a tyrant. Roosevelt was no tyrant, but he liked exercising power at his sole discretion, as when he gave a customs post to poet Edward Arlington Robinson for the good of literature, a job that Robinson had to be reminded to go to long enough to collect his paycheck. When he left office, Roosevelt had difficulty adjusting to his newfound inability to issue ukases; he consoled himself by going to Kenya and shooting everything he saw—his party bagged 512 African animals, including 8 elephants—and then returning to New York to conspire against his sometime friend and successor William Howard Taft, who protested that Roosevelt’s called-for regulatory and welfare reforms would require rewriting the Constitution. Roosevelt responded, ere long, by accusing Taft of “violating every canon of human ordinary decency and fair dealing,” which caused poor Taft to break down in tears. But Taft had the last laugh when Roosevelt was denied the Republican nomination in 1912, after which it was Democrat Woodrow Wilson’s turn to rule—and to withstand Roosevelt’s petitions, including the demand that he be given a colonel’s commission when the US entered WWI. Roosevelt’s response on being denied was characteristic: “Our rulers were supple and adroit,” he thundered, quoting the Bible, “but they were not mighty of soul.”
A mighty—and mighty trying—soul, very capably and vigorously scrutinized here.Pub Date: March 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-684-86477-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
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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