A sympathetic account of a president too often overlooked, embedded in a rethinking of the rise of the religious right.
The words “progressive” and “evangelical” may no longer be thought of together, yet in combination, they shaped Jimmy Carter as a man and president.
So argues academic and Episcopal priest Balmer (Arts and Sciences/Dartmouth Univ.; The Making of Evangelicalism: From Revivalism to Politics and Beyond, 2010, etc.). Carter has never been shy about his beliefs, the author notes, pointing to the way the then-governor of Georgia positioned his campaign for the presidency: “I'm a born-again Christian…and I don't want anything that's not God's will for my life.” Balmer organizes this biography to show that Carter's religious views are the foundation of his politics and continued to set a standard that guided the way he shaped his life after leaving office. Illustrations drawn from the former president's life and numerous writings highlight his discordance with the conservative religious fundamentalism allied to the tea party. As a businessman, for example, Carter refused to join the White Citizens' Council's opposition to school integration; he stood alone, defying boycott of his business and ostracism. However, he was also a fierce competitor who did what he thought necessary to win, as in the Georgia gubernatorial election in 1970. “You won't like my campaign…but you will like my administration,” he told Vernon Jordan. Carter's single-term presidency was characterized, according to Balmer, by the interplay between his ambitious competitiveness and service. Differing from those who attribute Carter's 1980 defeat by Ronald Reagan to foreign policy or economic issues, the author contends that Carter was undermined and out-organized by former supporters of segregation like Jerry Falwell, who birthed what is now known as the religious right by rallying a defense for the tax breaks of private schools.
A sympathetic account of a president too often overlooked, embedded in a rethinking of the rise of the religious right.Pub Date: May 13, 2014
ISBN: 978-0465029587
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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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