Adroitly told biography of Russell Long, longtime US senator from Louisiana, by his former press secretary. Long's legendary father, Huey (``Kingfish'') Long, was assassinated when the future senator was 16. As a young man, Russell showed the family flair for politics (his uncle Earl also was governor of Louisiana) and was elected at age 30 to the Senate- -an incoming class that included Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, and Estes Kefauver. Mann tells how senators initially suspicious of Long because of his father's skin-'em-and-feed-'em-to-the- alligators style of doing business were won over by this polite young man who cultivated friendships and coalitions. Long's early Senate years were marked by Quixote-like stands against massive foreign-aid proposals by Truman and Eisenhower: He believed the government should spend for domestic needs. Prescient in many ways (and frustrated by Eisenhower's tightfisted treatment of the poor), he said in 1955, ``Republicans believe that prosperity and most good things trickle down from the top.'' By 1965, Long had become chairman of the Finance Committee and also majority whip—the most powerful man in the Senate. Among his proposals were the check-off box for federally financed campaigns, the Employee Stock Ownership Plan, the Earned Income Tax credit, SSI, large increases in Medicaid, and two ideas (from 1972) being touted in the present presidential campaign: ``workfare'' and forcing runaway fathers to pay child support. One reason for Long's effectiveness, Mann says, was his plain-spoken manner. In a battle with Jimmy Carter, who wanted to cut deductions for the ``three-martini'' business lunch, Long told reporters that ``entertainment is to the selling business as fertilizer is to the farmer—it increases yield.'' An absorbing account of one of America's great Çminences grises. (Photos—not seen.)
Pub Date: Oct. 26, 1992
ISBN: 1-55778-467-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1992
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
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