bookshelf

CONFESSIONS OF A POLITICAL HITMAN

Name: CONFESSIONS OF A POLITICAL HITMAN
Author: Stephen Marks
ISBN: 978-1-4022-0854-6

by Stephen Marks ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 2008

Despite its flaws, a dark, damning and entertaining account from the campaign trenches.

bookshelf

A former “political opposition specialist” for high-profile Republicans recounts the sordid story of his evolution from right-wing political hit man to unrepentant centrist.

For more than a decade, Marks was “Oppo Man,” the go-to guy for Republicans who wanted dirt on their opponents. His job was to dig up damaging information on his clients’ political opposition and deliver it to pollsters, who figured out which bits would be most damaging in the public mind and then fed them to the media. Among Marks’s greatest hits: helping elect (and re-elect) George W. Bush as Texas governor in 1994 and 1998 and as president in 2000 and 2004; helping North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms defeat Harvey Gantt in 1996; and orchestrating the Republican juggernaut in Texas in 1998. His “right wing political beliefs began to crack,” he writes, during the 1996 presidential campaign, when neither Bob Dole nor Jack Kemp was able to attack Bill Clinton for his philandering because both had a history of adultery. By the time of Clinton’s impeachment, in the author’s opinion, “the Republican Party was weak because it was rotting from the inside, collapsing from the weight of its own flagrant hypocrisy.” Unfortunately, Marks is not as adept at examining his own actions as he is at condemning those of others; he makes brief mention of his womanizing and work for corrupt clients like Jack Abramoff but seems reluctant to draw any insights from those experiences. And his late adoption of centrist politics is a bit of a mystery: He expounds at length about his realization that the Republicans are ethically “just as bad” as the Democrats, but glosses over the political reasons for his transformation with a few brief remarks about the “extremism” of both the left and right wings of American politics.

Despite its flaws, a dark, damning and entertaining account from the campaign trenches.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2008

ISBN: 978-1-4022-0854-6

Page Count: 416

Publisher: Sourcebooks

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2007

Categories:

bookshelf

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.

bookshelf

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

bookshelf

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...

bookshelf

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)