An excellent chronicle of JFK’s innovations, his true personality, and how close he came to losing.
Accepting the challenge that Theodore White laid out in The Making of the President 1960: to “tell the story of the quest for power in 1960 in more precise terms with a greater wealth of established fact.”
In this successful acceptance of White’s challenge, Pulitzer Prize–winning Boston Globe journalist Oliphant (Utter Incompetents: Ego and Ideology in the Age of Bush, 2007, etc.) and former Globe foreign correspondent Wilkie (Journalism/Univ. of Mississippi; The Fall of the House of Zeus: The Rise and Ruin of America's Most Powerful Trial Lawyer, 2010) begin before John F. Kennedy’s run to be Adlai Stevenson’s running mate in 1956. Although popular opinion claims that JFK’s father directed his decisions and campaigns, JFK was always in charge and not afraid to oppose or ignore his father. He surrounded himself with shrewd advisers whose philosophy was brash and very successful. Most importantly to his later success, JFK started early. Then he bypassed the party bosses and labor unions and set up representatives in small towns to build support and lists of contacts. He and his team knew how to work the grass-roots strategy, giving tea parties for women, circulating petitions, and, most importantly, using TV ads. One of the first to closely monitor public opinion, JFK was handsome and popular, and the press loved his quotable accessibility. However, he was no shoo-in. His record in the Senate was weak, and his meek responses to Joe McCarthy worked against him. Race and religion were major undercurrents throughout the race, and the lead flipped back and forth multiple times. White was spot-on in his prediction of the availability of new information. Oliphant and Wilkie mined a wealth of fresh material to show how Kennedy approached his campaign in innovative ways. The authors impressively navigate all the new information to present a compelling story, easily shifting geographically and supplying background vital to understanding the whole picture.
An excellent chronicle of JFK’s innovations, his true personality, and how close he came to losing.Pub Date: May 9, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-0556-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
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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