Jenkins—author (Truman, 1986, etc.); chancellor of Oxford University; former home secretary and chancellor of the exchequer in various Labour governments—engagingly turns his formidable narrative skills to his own fascinating life. The author's father, a coal-miner of Welsh origin, was, we learn, an ardent unionist who attended Oxford on a union scholarship and became a prominent Labour member of Parliament. Jenkins himself, after a brilliant career at Oxford and as a wartime code-breaker, entered Parliament as a member for Southwark, espousing traditional Labour positions. In Parliament, he came under the influence of Hugh Gaitskell, leader of the Labour Party during the 1950's and champion of that party's right wing. Jenkins quickly assumed a position of leadership, so that, when Labour won a majority in 1964, he easily gained an important Cabinet portfolio, that of home secretary. He subsequently was responsible not only for a major revamping of British law but also for an attempted reshaping of the Labour Party. Jenkins was central to the debate on Britain's integration into the European Community, and, as president of the European Commission, he strengthened that nascent organization, assisting notably in the creation of the European Monetary System. Under Thatcher, he played an unwitting role in the perpetuation of Conservative rule when he cofounded the centrist Social Democratic Party—which, allied with the Liberal Party, split the anti-Conservative vote, and which, after Jenkins's resignation, rapidly disintegrated. A substantial feast spiced by warm, vivid accounts of encounters with Johnson, Kennedy, Harold Wilson, and other lesser politicians, and by an insider's view of the hothouse world of Parliamentary politics. (Sixteen pages of b&w photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: March 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-679-41311-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1993
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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