An excellent resource that hews to the president’s words as reflecting or obscuring his actions.
A fine, fully fleshed portrait of Franklin Roosevelt during his final years, in his own words.
As he did in his previous volume, Franklin D. Roosevelt: Road to the New Deal: 1882-1939 (2015), Daniels (Emeritus, History/Univ. of Cincinnati) sticks to FDR’s public utterances, offering extensive extracts of speeches and communiqués to elucidate the evolution of his wartime policy. The early probing question—during the 1940 presidential campaign, as FDR was champing at the bit to aid beleaguered Britain while skirting the prevailing isolationist atmosphere in America—remains: “to what degree the president was deliberately misleading the American people about his foreign policy intentions”? The answer, from the record Daniels presents, was a great deal. However, the author fairly examines the communiqués regarding the peace mission with the Japanese in late 1941 (just prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor), and the president seemed to be sincerely hoping to maintain peace in the Pacific as long as possible rather than provoke a Japanese attack. During these fraught war years, FDR and his administration were particularly concerned with managing the civilian economy in support of the war effort, as the substantial body of this work takes up in detail. Daniels spotlights FDR’s early and extraordinary emphasis on creating the future United Nations. He had a vision of a peaceful postwar world when no peace was in sight, and he pushed for the prosecution of war criminals. Moreover, Daniels exposes the duplicitous “spin” given by the White House physician, who deliberately underplayed (or ignored) the severity of the president’s heart condition. The author does a fine historical service in allowing FDR’s rich, wise, moving words to emerge here, giving an illuminating portrait of a president in time of unprecedented world crisis.
An excellent resource that hews to the president’s words as reflecting or obscuring his actions.Pub Date: March 30, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-252-03952-2
Page Count: 712
Publisher: Univ. of Illinois
Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
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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