Why sully or smash icons when it’s so fun to make new ones out of Silly Putty?
The Bushes are wonderful; the Clintons are not.
Kessler—once an investigative journalist (Washington Post, Wall Street Journal), now a White House apologist (A Matter of Character, 2004, not reviewed)—tells the authorized story of Laura Lane Welch, who married George W. Bush in 1977. Quoting authorities ranging from childhood friends to political allies to the Lone Ranger (really), the intrepid author discovers that Laura wears Cover Girl makeup and Oscar de la Renta gowns. At 17, she ran a stop sign and killed a classmate, but she wasn’t speeding, and the sign wasn’t all that easy to see, you know? She grew up in segregated communities and attended segregated schools. So what? Some of her best friends are . . . you know. An ancestor was named Wiseman. Sounds Jewish but probably isn’t. (Whew!) She used to smoke (still cheats occasionally). She is pro-choice, but on policy matters, she defers to Bushie (her down-home hypocorism for GWB). Bushie himself is like Lincoln, or maybe even Ronald Reagan, and if he’d been president way back whenever it was, the Holocaust wouldn’t have been all that bad. Bushie drank a lot, once, but so do a lot of other people. Laura has read just about every book there is. (Jacqueline Kennedy, by comparison, was a dilettante.) The Clintons ran the White House like a fraternity—greasy old pizza boxes everywhere, people staying up late, wearing jeans. And both Clintons were unkind to the help. Bushie didn’t like Peter Jennings (he was so critical), but the president prayed for him anyhow. Laura—unlike Hillary—keeps her influence quiet and has much better taste in interior decoration. At age 22, the Bush twins were “knockout gorgeous and outrageously charming.” Sure, Jenna drinks a little and used someone’s else’s ID once. Big deal. John Kerry lost on the character issue.
Why sully or smash icons when it’s so fun to make new ones out of Silly Putty?Pub Date: April 4, 2006
ISBN: 0-385-51621-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2006
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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