Intriguing pieces, unobtrusively and skillfully edited, that form both a time and a timeless capsule.
An eclectic collection from the highly literate and scholarly president of the United States.
Editor Hutner (English/Univ. of Illinois; What America Read: Taste, Class, and the Novel, 1920–1960, 2008) had a difficult task: selecting representative samples from among the mountains of Roosevelt’s publications. Some selections are unsurprising—from his opening essay on “The Strenuous Life” to his account of the taking of San Juan Hill (with two different descriptions of brains leaking from head wounds)—but there are also some welcome surprises. In a 1903 speech at the New York State Fair, he declared his solidarity with the common man in an allusion to The Three Musketeers—“All for each and each for all”—and passages from his 1910 speech at Osawatomie, Kan., seem lifted from a progressive op-ed piece from last week’s New York Times. Frequently, Roosevelt urged workers to organize—and then be reasonable. He argued for control of trusts, for women’s rights (wives, he said, should be partners, not servants) and for equal treatment of blacks. His racial ideas, though (as the editor notes), were progressive for Roosevelt’s time—not ours. He praised the performance of black soldiers in Cuba but also notes that “of course” they need white officers. In addition, he had kind words for the Indian warriors we slaughtered. Also included is a long 1912 speech about the necessity of historians to write with the imagination of the novelist (a dictum he did not always manage to follow), a sanguinary piece about the pleasures of shooting grizzly bears, the expected stuff about keeping fit and being virtuous (he sounds sometimes like a gung-ho Boy Scout leader), and the necessity of maintaining a war-ready army and navy.
Intriguing pieces, unobtrusively and skillfully edited, that form both a time and a timeless capsule.Pub Date: April 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-345-80611-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2014
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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