Sturdy political biography of the author of modern American conservatism (not authorized, but written with its subject's cooperation) . Historian Goldberg (Univ. of Utah) is well grounded in the big picturethe evolution of conservative thought and the inner workings of electoral politics. This helps him to place Goldwater in the tradition of the libertarian right and also to document the social and political forces that brought him, if only for a brief time, to the forefront of the Republican Party after the collapse of Nelson Rockefeller's moderate agenda in the early 1960s. Goldberg's analysis of national trends of the timeand especially of the role of the mediawill be of special interest to students of contemporary politics. Goldberg also has an appreciation for the smaller details, such as Goldwater's fascination with aircraft, radios, photography, and the outdoors, the things that make the icon of conservatism human. (So, too, does Goldwater's wry, self-deprecating humor, such as his saying to journalist Stewart Alsop in the thick of the 1964 presidential campaign, ``You know, I haven't got a really first-class brain.'') Himself a resident of the West, Goldberg understands the ``frontier values'' that affected Goldwater's conception of politics, such as his belief that a government ought to operate like his mother's household, ``open, direct, and honest.'' Goldberg points out a few ironiesfor one, the civil libertarian Goldwater's championing of Joseph McCarthy, saying, ``the people who want to get rid of [him] . . . are people who coddle communists''and notes that Arizonans, a conservative bunch and Goldwater's earliest constituency, have long benefited from federal largess for which the antiBig Government Goldwater was largely responsible. All in all, a useful addition to the growing library of books (see Lee Edwards's Goldwater, p. 751) on Goldwater's role in postwar American politics.
Pub Date: Oct. 18, 1995
ISBN: 0-300-06261-3
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1995
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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