A crisp portrait that adds to a broader understanding of the use of fear as an enduring political stratagem.
The rise and fall of the Wisconsin chicken farmer who, as a junior senator seeking power and prestige, briefly gained both as the nation’s anti-communist Grand Inquisitor in the 1950s.
No apologist for whom he considers perhaps America’s most effective demagogue of the latter half of the 20th century, the longtime New York Times national political writer is still able to illuminate—as perhaps McCarthy’s bitterest opponents never could—the human being behind the anti-Red rampage that brought innuendo and smear tactics to new lows in Washington. The author’s examination brings no radical or, for that matter, original conclusions on the ultimate impact of McCarthy’s campaign to rid government and its agencies of those tinged by the most casual association with anything related to Communist ideology. However, Wicker’s experience and analytical dexterity uncover and reassemble a host of factoids that help us understand how the phenomenon took its grip and gathered momentum so rapidly. McCarthy’s innate intelligence (an educational dropout, he went back at age 21 to complete four years of high school in nine months) and energy are seen as key. He senses that enhancing his U.S. Marines war record will win him elections and is willing to bet that the press won’t bother to check it; and, building on that experience, also bets the same press will run with sensational stories before fully checking the facts of accusations that his key targets are besmirched with Communist leanings, present or past. Wicker’s behind-the-scenes insights are pungent: For example, after Edward R. Murrow’s damning national broadcast (depicted in the recent film Good Night, and Good Luck), Senator Lyndon Johnson insists that committee hearings, which he expected would effectively expose and eviscerate “McCarthyism,” be televised to the nation in their entirety. And later, at the McCarthy graveside, a lone mourner from the other camp: Robert F. Kennedy.
A crisp portrait that adds to a broader understanding of the use of fear as an enduring political stratagem.Pub Date: March 20, 2006
ISBN: 0-15-101082-X
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2006
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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