A timely, amusing, and occasionally eye-opening exercise.
On the theory that experience is the best predictor of future performance, Morris (Supreme Commander: MacArthur’s Triumph in Japan, 2014, etc.) examines and evaluates, as any hiring committee might, the resumes of 15 men, all past applicants for the job of president.
To judge the fitness for the Oval Office of figures as towering as Washington and Lincoln, as dubious as William Randolph Hearst, and as little remembered as William Henry Harrison, the author uses four criteria: “accomplishments,” “intangibles,” “judgment,” and “overall” (a summary of all the information known about the candidate). Notwithstanding the intentional diversity of his list, a couple “candidates” appear out of place: the otherwise estimable Gen. George C. Marshall was never seriously considered for Franklin Roosevelt’s vice president, and Jefferson Davis was elected president, yes, but of the Confederacy. Still, the disagreements readers will have with Morris, his methodology, and his assessments are part of the fun of any exercise like this. As he rates the aspirants, the author turns up interesting little nuggets about each: why Jefferson in 1826 thought DeWitt Clinton was the greatest living American and why Lincoln, too, sought to emulate the father of the Erie Canal; how Ronald Reagan devised his own version of shorthand to deliver his seemingly effortless speeches; why Robert Kennedy and Barry Goldwater were perhaps too hot for the presidency, Herbert Hoover and Samuel Tilden, too cold; how Henry Wallace failed to match self-discipline with his prodigious intellect; why Maine’s Bowdoin College awarded an honorary degree to Jefferson Davis two years before the Civil War; how Wendell Willkie, without ever holding public office, captured the Republican nomination; why the Democrats twice denied their top honor to William McAdoo, the most accomplished treasury secretary since Hamilton. Why wisdom trumps experience, judgment beats sheer hard work, broad intelligence bests narrow brilliance—these considerations, too, figure into Morris’ appraisals.
A timely, amusing, and occasionally eye-opening exercise.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61234-850-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Potomac Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2016
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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