Admiring, sometimes cloyingly worshipful bio of New Jersey's governor. Trentonian reporter McClure tries to depict Christine Todd Whitman's trip from her silver-spoon upbringing in solidly Republican Somerset County to the New Jersey governor's mansion as a triumph against odds. But McClure's account tends to show instead that Whitman's political career and her economic conservatism grew naturally out of the privileged and politically active milieu from which she emerged. McClure's snapshots of Whitman's social life may make it hard for the more proletarian reader to relate (``Christie returned home to fox hunt,'' one anecdote begins, ``and had an amusing encounter with Jackie Onassis''). After staffing posts in Nelson Rockefeller's 1968 presidential campaign, the Republican National Committee, and the 1972 Nixon campaign, she married John Whitman, a New York financial consultant ``with the proper credentials,'' in 1974, and settled down to eight years as a full- time wife and mother. McClure covers in detail Whitman's unsuccessful 1990 run for the Senate against the popular Bill Bradley and her 1993 defeat of hated incumbent governor Jim Florio; the author manages to treat both races, lost and won by razor-thin margins, as triumphs for Whitman. Briskly reviewing her record as governor, McClure shows that Whitman's inoffensive blend of fiscal conservatism and with-it social positions (pro-choice, pro-gay rights) seemed to go down well with voters. Although McClure indicates that Whitman's social views may have alienated the Republican party's right wing, she tantalizingly suggests that Whitman may be a front-runner for the 1996 vice-presidential nomination. Christie fans will enjoy; others may wonder what the fuss is about. (photos, not seen) (First printing of 50,000; $50,000 ad/promo; author tour)
Pub Date: Jan. 30, 1996
ISBN: 1-57392-014-2
Page Count: 273
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1995
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
SEEN & HEARD
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