Thanks to the broader perspective added by Neal’s expert annotations, this warm and provocative collection will appeal to...
Previously unpublished letters between President Truman and the woman he dubbed “First Lady of the World.”
While researching Harry and Ike: The Partnership That Remade the Postwar World (2001), Chicago Sun-Times columnist Neal unearthed a cache of intimate correspondence between Truman and former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and recognized that readers would find the private, personal letters between these two public figures compelling. The letters reveal how their friendship began as Truman reached out to the newly widowed first lady in 1945 and offered her an appointment as one of the first representatives to the FDR-inspired United Nations. This early bonding blossomed into a bold mutual respect that manifested itself during crises as varied as the death of Truman’s mother and General Douglas MacArthur’s insubordination during the Korean War. Despite their warm friendship, the volume also reveals significant tension during the periods when Truman and Roosevelt’s political views diverged. According to Neal, Roosevelt’s belief that Truman couldn’t win the 1948 presidential election led her to covertly support her sons’ efforts to draft Dwight Eisenhower as the Democratic candidate. Other letters show how disagreements over Truman’s treatment of conscientious objectors or his early dealings with the Soviet Union further strained their friendship. Despite these occasional political differences, the correspondence (bolstered by Neal’s keen historical insights) suggests that Truman and Roosevelt’s deepening relationship enriched not only their own lives, but also the character of their nation in the early days of the Cold War.
Thanks to the broader perspective added by Neal’s expert annotations, this warm and provocative collection will appeal to general readers as well as Truman and Roosevelt specialists.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-7432-0243-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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
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