Lippman’s portrait is likely to prove valuable in the future as an accurate, unbiased record of Albright’s term—and of the...
An animated account of Madeleine Albright’s career as Secretary of State that incorporates an examination of the foreign policy challenges (both met and unmet) of the Clinton administration.
Former Washington Post bureau chief Lippman doggedly recounts all the international episodes, speeches, television appearances, and interviews of Albright from the last four years. The result is somewhat akin to watching a flashback of a scene that has just taken place: more details come into focus, but the benefit of hindsight is lacking. However, in pulling all of his material together, Lippman accomplishes what the Clinton administration itself has failed to do—namely, to piece together a coherent, consistent portrayal of Albright and the diplomacy she has come to embody. Contrary to the popular criticism that she lacks a strategic vision, Lippman shows that Albright has been nothing if not clear in her formulation of goals, the most basic of which is the protection of America’s domestic interests by promoting economic and political security abroad. “That formulation may be flawed, or at times naive, but at least it was clearly expressed,” he declares. In fact, Lippman’s record of Albright’s public (and, occasionally, her private) dialogue shows that the Secretary of State has been not merely consistent in stating the administration’s goals—she has been downright redundant. That she has been so widely misunderstood is a mystery, Lippman argues, especially as her extensive use of public appearance and personal candor distinguishes her from her predecessors. This is not an intimate portrait, however, or a probing analysis: Lippman sticks mostly to what he knows best (i.e., Albright’s dealings with the press) and makes of it a thoroughly credible if not revelatory study.
Lippman’s portrait is likely to prove valuable in the future as an accurate, unbiased record of Albright’s term—and of the confusions of post–Cold War international politics.Pub Date: June 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-8133-9767-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2000
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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