Here, deposed Navajo tribal chairman MacDonald, convicted last fall of corruption, tells (with the aid of Schwarz—The Hillside Strangler, etc.) his side of the story. As an autobiography of a contemporary Native American, his tale is absorbing; as an exploration of guilt, it is an exercise in finger-pointing and excusatory moral relativism. MacDonald's rise to naat'aannii, or leader, of the 200,000 Navajo in Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico is also an interesting look at the history, culture, and organization of the tribe. Educated in Bureau of Indian Affairs schools, MacDonald drifted from job to job and was once an apprentice medicine man. Eventually trained as an electrical engineer, he left his job at Hughes Aircraft in 1963 to head the Office of Navajo Economic Opportunity, which led to his election in 1970 as tribal chairman. An effective leader and shrewd businessman, he garnered good deals for the tribe's oil, coal, and gas, and managed extensive improvements in roads, sewers, and housing. However, his ``imperial chairmanship'' brought charges of corruption as early as 1977. The Hopi-Navajo land disputes and his bitter feud with Barry Goldwater (who, MacDonald claims, tried to have him killed in 1976) culminated in vicious infighting and the death of two of his followers. By the late 1980's, MacDonald's penchant for hot tubs, BMWs, and chartered planes and his involvement in a multimillion-dollar land deal led to a Senate investigation. Despite admitting his acceptance of ``gifts'' from ``friends,'' and despite his own son's testimony against him, MacDonald claims here that the Senate committee ``deliberately framed him''by withholding evidence. His overvaluation by $7 million of the ``Big Bo'' ranch was ``just the way good old boys play the Arizona real estate game,'' and his acceptance of cash payments was ``no different from those of many U.S. congressional representatives and senators.'' Perversely fascinating, but MacDonald's painting himself as a victim of history and politics will convince few. (Twenty-one pages of photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: July 31, 1991
ISBN: 1-56129-093-9
Page Count: 488
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1991
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
SEEN & HEARD
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