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FEINGOLD

Name: FEINGOLD
Author: Sandy Horwitt
ISBN: 978-1-4165-3492-1

A NEW DEMOCRATIC PARTY

by Sandy Horwitt ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 24, 2007

Not an official biography, but it might as well be.

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Admiring portrait of the maverick liberal who was the only U.S. Senator to oppose the Patriot Act and the first to call for a timetable for American troop withdrawal from Iraq.

Horwitt, the biographer of activist Saul Alinsky (Let Them Call Me Rebel, 1989), draws extensively on interviews with friends, family and colleagues of the 54-year-old, twice-divorced Wisconsin Democrat. Russ Feingold grew up in one of the few Jewish families in Janesville, a small farming community. His Yiddish-speaking Russian grandfather Max owned a grocery store; his father was a progressive lawyer. One of five children, Feingold early showed himself to be bright, hardworking and a self-described “renegade by nature,” waging campaigns at his high school for a more relaxed dress code and other reforms. He first tasted politics at the University of Wisconsin, where he campaigned for John Lindsay in the 1972 Presidential primary. After college and a stint as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, he attended Harvard Law, practiced briefly and won election to the Wisconsin state senate in 1982. Ten years later, at 39, he became the youngest member of the U.S. Senate. He co-sponsored the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance reform bill, passed in 2002, led efforts to censure George Bush over NSA wiretapping of international phone calls and remains a steadfast opponent of the Iraq war. Written with the senator’s cooperation, the book describes an unfailingly courageous politician who champions reform in the progressive tradition of Teddy Roosevelt and Wisconsin Governor Robert M. La Follette, often to the consternation of colleagues. “You’re not living in the real world,” Hillary Clinton told him when he objected to the Democratic Party’s efforts to gut McCain-Feingold. Noting that the Wisconsin senator has been discussed as a possible presidential contender, the author suggests that Feingold offers “a serious, authentic alternative” to Washington’s Democratic establishment.

Not an official biography, but it might as well be.

Pub Date: July 24, 2007

ISBN: 978-1-4165-3492-1

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2007

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | POLITICAL & ROYALTY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)