A big, wonderfully readable tale certain to delight political junkies.
A winning memoir from a high-end consultant to Democratic presidential candidates.
Shrum, now a senior fellow at NYU, recalls three and a half decades in the political game, where he started out in 1970 as the wunderkind 26-year-old speechwriter for New York Mayor John Lindsay and then became a top and sometimes controversial strategist for a string of unsuccessful presidential hopefuls, from George McGovern and Dick Gephardt to Al Gore and John Kerry. “Sooner or later, your luck is bound to change,” said Ted Kennedy. It never did. But what a ride: After the Georgetown debate team and Harvard Law, he plunged into politics and began crafting the main Democratic messages of our time. Writing with engaging candor, he describes the rise of modern political consulting, offering incisive snapshots of such notables as Edmund Muskie, the doom and gloomer; Jimmy Carter, of the “empty pieties”; and the existential John Kerry. We see Shrum talking theology with Mario Cuomo, advising Bill Clinton in the Lewinsky scandal and enlisting Warren Beatty to help convince McGovern to remove a Ralph Waldo Emerson quote from the end of a speech. (“Look, George, you can’t do this,” said Beatty. “It would be like making love to a beautiful woman…and then at the last minute pulling out and saying, ‘I’ll let Ralph finish for me.’ ”) There are countless bright stories about friends (Hunter S. Thompson, Pamela Harriman and Larry Tribe) and many clients who won election to the U.S. Senate. The book brims with speechwriting tips: Offend no one and you persuade no one. Beware of lines that sound too good not to be used—rhetoric can outpace reality. Like a symphony, he writes, a good political speech rises and rouses the audience, then falls to a quieter level, “transfixing the listeners instead of eliciting applause.”
A big, wonderfully readable tale certain to delight political junkies.Pub Date: June 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-7432-9651-9
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2007
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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