Those who survived the Nixon era will shudder anew; younger readers will find this a lucid survey of a strange time.
A useful account of Richard Nixon’s tumultuous tenure as chief executive.
Presidential chronicler and journalist Reeves (Running in Place: How Bill Clinton Disappointed America, 1996, etc.) has done his homework well for this study of Nixon’s years as president, consulting mountains of recently declassified documents and interviewing Nixon cohorts and confidants such as John Dean, Richard Helms, William Safire, Pat Buchanan, John Ehrlichman, and Egil “Bud” Krogh. For all his hard work, Reeves doesn’t give us much that other biographers and analysts haven’t already provided, including evidence of Nixon’s raging anti-Semitism, his near-pathological paranoia and propensity for lying, and his dislike of the eminently dislikable Henry Kissinger. Still, it’s good to have that evidence in one volume, especially one as well-written as Reeves’s, and even more so given the curious tendency of pundits and historians in the last decade to sign off on Nixon’s own post-presidential efforts to depict himself as one of America’s great statesmen, never mind the unfortunate tactical errors in such matters as Watergate and Vietnam. Reeves gives appropriate nods to Nixon’s very real accomplishments in foreign policy, including his rapprochement with China—which, Reeves documents, occupied Nixon in the earliest days of his first term, though it would not come to pass for several years. Kissinger, who was in the habit of dismissing antiwar protestors as a pack of spoiled children, and who did not brook criticism even from his nominal superiors (“He’s a devious bastard,” Nixon remarked of his primary foreign-policy adviser), comes in for a well-deserved drubbing. Reeves treats others in the Nixon White House with a kind of detached respect, even as he recounts their escapades in selling ambassadorships and subverting the Constitution.
Those who survived the Nixon era will shudder anew; younger readers will find this a lucid survey of a strange time.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-684-80231-7
Page Count: 800
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 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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