A fine contextualization of Roosevelt’s life and times.
Golway (American History/Kean Univ.; Ronald Reagan’s America, 2008, etc.) presents an audio-and-text survey of President Franklin Roosevelt’s key speeches.
Like his similar books on the speeches of Presidents Kennedy and Reagan, this book includes a CD of speech excerpts, with the book’s text amplifying and clarifying the events contained in the audio. Each chapter focuses on a particular speech, with the track number provided. In the chapter on Roosevelt’s first inaugural address on March 4, 1933, Golway deftly sketches not only the preceding presidential campaign, but also specific details of the speech itself—for example, that the famous line, “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” written by Roosevelt, may have been inspired by a similar phrase from Henry David Thoreau. While listening to the audio, readers will be struck by Roosevelt’s immense oratory skills. In his famous “fireside chats,” the president adopted a down-to-earth, fatherly tone, but when the occasion demanded it, he could thunderously deliver such lines as, “this generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.” Golway also emphasizes the president’s talent as a speechwriter. His famous speech the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor (“a date which will live in infamy”) was comprised of his words alone. And what powerful words they were—immediately after, Congress passed a motion declaring war on Japan with just one vote of dissent. Golway closes with Roosevelt’s final speech to Congress, in March 1945, when the president was thin, frail and exhausted. The context makes the audio of the speech, in which a clearly tired Roosevelt makes lighthearted reference to his leg braces, all the more poignant.
A fine contextualization of Roosevelt’s life and times.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4022-1716-6
Page Count: 316
Publisher: Sourcebooks MediaFusion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2009
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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