Running counter to the tide, Wellstone's progressive, populist voice is as rare and bracing as that of our national bird.
An inspiriting call for active citizen politics from Minnesota Senator Wellstone, a dyed-in-the-wool liberal whose passion for participatory politics is as enlivening as a breath of fresh air and as heart-gladdening as all things generous, inclusive, and discerning have a way of being.
Wellstone's is a politics of compassion, in pursuit of “affordable child care, good education for children, health security, living-wage jobs that will support families, respect for the environment and human rights, and clean elections and clean campaigns,” for he is a devout believer in electoral politics. His book is anecdotally rich, not in the manner of self-serving testimonials, but rather as examples of how politics can work on the local, personal level, outside the ridiculous folkways of the Senate floor, where issues give way to maneuvering. He is not content here to simply provide a laundry list of American governmental failures—many of which stem from economic injustices, in his opinion—but he endeavors to convey a sense of how grassroots organizing and participatory democracy (“the challenge is to make a place for all Americans at the decision-making table”) can educate an electorate still firmly behind the Bill of Rights to demand action on all fronts, from true welfare reform, where market forces aren't left to tend the hen house, to agricultural subsidies going where they are most needed, rather than agribusinesses. He provides insights into the pathetic defeat of health-care reform, a sobering portrait of how the Senate works, and why stumping in the hustings is not just effective politics (his own campaign is a worthy example), but fundamental to democracy. Wellstone also has a remarkable way of making what sounds naïve in other mouths sound sincere and realizable from his: “Politics is not about money and power games. It is about improving people's lives, about making our country better.”
Running counter to the tide, Wellstone's progressive, populist voice is as rare and bracing as that of our national bird.Pub Date: May 22, 2001
ISBN: 0-679-46294-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2001
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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