Former Illinois Republican Congressman Findley (Silent No More: Confronting America’s False Images of Islam, 2001, etc.) reflects on the time he served in office—1960 to 1982—and the lessons he learned over the years.
The congressman reminds us of the time when bipartisanship was the rule not the exception. As a middle-of-the-road Republican, he was a fiscal conservative but also active supporter of civil-rights legislation. Although he started off as a hawk, he became a proponent of ending the war in Vietnam. An admirer of Eisenhower, Findley also respected JFK and his measured approach during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Raised in a small town in Illinois, the author began his career as a reporter while still in high school—ultimately becoming the owner and publisher of the Pike County Republican—and his first taste of politics was during the 1936 election, when he supported Alf Landon against FDR. Astonishing today, the author writes that his first election victory cost “slightly less than $21,000, all paid in full the day before voting.” In 1973, Findley, who was part of a congressional group visiting the Middle East, met Yasser Arafat and became concerned about Israel's treatment of Palestinians. This was a transformative experience. “ I became convinced Palestinians had legitimate grievances against our government,” he writes. Overlooking all other relevant geopolitical issues, including the Cold War and the oil crises, the author writes that since the Kennedy Administration, “all U.S. Presidents have done the bidding of Israel's lobby, and the Congress has done the same,” resulting in “religious bias in foreign policy” and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. A serviceable overview of a distinguished career, somewhat marred by the author’s occasionally extremist views.
Pub Date: June 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-56976-625-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Lawrence Hill Books/Chicago Review
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2011
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
SEEN & HEARD
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