Under Reagan, recently all but canonized, the economy suffered, big government grew bigger, the military got new toys but...
The Reagan years were a triumph of the imagination indeed—and a defeat of reality. So suggests presidential biographer Reeves (President Nixon, 2001, etc.), who offers a different Ronald Reagan from that of the hagiographers.
Reeves’s Reagan is sharper than he is given credit for, aware that ideas—not facts—are important, and that assuring words are even more so. Thus, when Jimmy Carter decried the national crisis of confidence in 1979, Reagan was there to say, “I find nothing wrong with Americans,” implying that the crisis was the Democrats. Entering office with just half the vote, Reagan, an ideologue posing as moderate, immediately set about fulfilling four goals: reducing taxes, strengthening the military, containing communism and restoring national pride. Reducing taxes, Reeves shows, meant massive giveaways to the rich; strengthening the military meant running the deficit up to historic levels; containing communism meant the dirty adventurism of Iran-Contra. But some sort of pride was restored, a blind trust that allowed Reagan a pass no matter what his errors. Thus, though fully two-thirds of respondents to a Washington Post poll believed that Reagan was lying about what he knew about said Iran-Contra, “his overall job approval was recorded at 53 percent.” By Reeves’s account, Reagan—at turns earthy, remote and ill-tempered, used to treating even friends as hired hands—could do all manner of wrong and never be called to answer for it. Even his conservative base turned on him when he made one embarrassing error too many, in this instance by failing to respond to the downing of KAL 007. Yet he survived and more, outlasting many a lieutenant against whom he looked quite reasonable (think Al Haig) and even making historical points for his dealings with Gorbachev.
Under Reagan, recently all but canonized, the economy suffered, big government grew bigger, the military got new toys but not better soldiers or leaders. And as for national pride…Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-7432-3022-1
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2005
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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