An absorbing insider’s view of more than 50 years of U.S. history.
Former Vice President Mondale calls upon his five decades of experience in public office to address today’s dangerously polarized political process.
In 1964, when the author came to Washington to fill Hubert Humphrey’s vacated Senate seat, “[a]cross the South, African-Americans couldn’t eat at a lunch counter, couldn’t drink from a public drinking fountain, often couldn’t register to vote.” The Cold War was also a frightening reality, and “nearly 20 percent of Americans lived in poverty.” Liberals in both parties fought together against Southern Democrats and Goldwater Republicans to pass civil-rights legislation. Mondale attributes ending the war in Vietnam to intervention by Senate liberals, which finally forced Lyndon Johnson and, later, Richard Nixon to address the increasing debacles on the ground. The author also examines the significant role of the bipartisan Senate commission—on which he served—in bringing Nixon to account on Watergate and its attendant criminal activities. The author deplores the failure of the Senate to conduct a similar investigation of the actions of the Bush/Cheney administration for what he believes to have been constitutional violations—attempting to use the president’s role as commander-in-chief to “set policy without answering to anyone but themselves,” and employing torture in defiance of the Geneva Accords. Though Mondale argued against many of President Carter’s decisions, he believes that history has yet to give Carter his due. It was Carter, he notes, not Reagan, who first cut back on government programs and “deregulated the airline industry, the trucking industry, and the prices of oil and gas.”
An absorbing insider’s view of more than 50 years of U.S. history.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4391-5866-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2010
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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