Strictly for admirers.
A worshipful portrait of Dick Cheney.
Cheney, famously, does not talk, except to those of whom he has approved, and then not much. Here he rounds up a few words for neocon Weekly Standard senior writer Hayes, who loudly defended the veep’s dodgy answers to uncomfortable questions regarding Iraq and al-Qaeda. A few of those words are revealing, as are quotations pulled from other interviews, such as Cheney’s remark, “Am I the evil genius in the corner that nobody ever sees come out of his hole? It’s a nice way to operate, actually.” Hayes allows that his subject’s callow youth had its unsavory aspects, from a couple of drunk-driving arrests to years of evasion of service in Vietnam. (Of which Cheney famously said, “I had other priorities in the 60s than military service.”) Glory years in the Nixon and Ford administrations move Hayes to much praiseful eloquence, though sometimes one wants to read between the lines, as when Cheney and Rumsfeld, famously the tightest of allies, found themselves nursing separate ambitions in an episode featuring a fleeting appearance by Christine Todd Whitman. Reading further between the lines, it emerges from Hayes’s reporting that Cheney was initially reluctant to invade Iraq, then warmed to the job, stemming the hated Colin Powell’s namby-pambyism and consolidating neocon power while finding time to tell Patrick Leahy to—well, it involves the F word. As for Valerie Plame, WMDs, the Hussein-bin Laden link and all that? Hayes notes in closing, “As much as Cheney has tried to ignore the harshest of the criticism leveled at him, he concedes that the sustained attacks about the administration’s use of intelligence…have changed the way he performs his job.” In other words, he’s still not talking.
Strictly for admirers.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-06-072346-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2007
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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