A thoughtful account, likening Nehru to Thomas Jefferson in ways both positive and negative.
A well-crafted life of the Indian politician and independence-movement hero.
Like Mao Zedong in China, Jawaharlal Nehru has lost a lot of the stature he enjoyed in India half a century ago, in much the same way and for much the same reason. “His mistakes are magnified,” writes novelist (Riot, 2001, etc.) and UN official Tharoor, “his achievements belittled.” The Indian government continues to profess the four tenets of Nehruvian thought—democratic institution-building, pan-Indian secularism, socialist economic policies, and a foreign policy of nonalignment—but, Tharoor adds, “all have been challenged, and strained to the breaking point, by the developments of recent years.” The author charts the evolution of Nehru’s life, showing how the spoiled only child of a Brahmin Kashmiri family shed his privileged, anglophilic attitudes as he became ever more aware of the injustices of British colonial rule; ironically, Tharoor suggests, he was radicalized after returning to India from England and realizing that the “rights of Englishmen . . . could not be his because he was not English enough to enjoy them,” even as he once confessed that his years at Harrow and Cambridge had made him “as much prejudiced in favor of England and the English as it was possible for an Indian to be.” Nehru developed into a shrewd practical politician and editorialist who entered into powerful alliances, notably with Mohandas Gandhi, but who charted his own course. Gandhi repeatedly chastised Nehru for his radicalism, and indeed Nehru was not shy of taking up arms rather than following Gandhi’s peaceful example—after independence, when Nehru ordered the Indian army to seize the Portuguese province of Goa, John F. Kennedy told the Indian ambassador in Washington “that India might consider delivering fewer self-righteous sermons on nonviolence.”
A thoughtful account, likening Nehru to Thomas Jefferson in ways both positive and negative.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-55970-697-X
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Well-told and admonitory.
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
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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