An unsparing profile of James Forrestal (1892-1949), Secretary of the Navy under Truman, by Hoopes (The Devil and John Foster Dulles, 1973, etc.) and Brinkley (History/Hofstra Univ.). This is a bold, strongly psychological investigation of a man who cut the ties that bind, made a spectacular success and a dangerous marriage (to Vogue writer Josephine Ogden), and took his own life after a dramatic breakdown. Born into a small-town lower- middle-class Irish Catholic family, Forrestal put his background quickly behind him upon entering Princeton—where he was voted ``Most Likely to Succeed'' before dropping out for obscure reasons shortly before graduation. Rather than return home, he took demeaning work for over a year before walking into the office of a Princeton Wall Street acquaintance. His classic Roaring Twenties career made him a millionaire: The authors' comparisons with Gatsby are not far-fetched. Controlled, polite, and mysterious, Forrestal was also respected and liked, an eligible and promiscuous bachelor member of the Wall Street elite, working with the legendary Clarence Dillon on epic deals that made financial history, accepted by old money as well as by celebrities like Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, and Gary Cooper. Meanwhile, his wife, ``Jo,'' turned out to be as stubborn and original as himself, and their open marriage (his womanizing never stopped) was stormy yet successful. Forrestal was a logical inductee to the coming WW II war effort; but while his Washington career eclipsed his Wall Street success, his workaholic life was coming apart. By the time he became Secretary of the Navy, the authors say, his denial of his wife's alcoholism and schizophrenia presaged an abrupt and irreversible collapse, triggered by his dismissal by Truman. A powerful biography—critical but sympathetic—of a driven man whose dark side permeates the narrative. (Thirty-six photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: April 16, 1992
ISBN: 0-394-57761-2
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
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