Doubtless we’ll be hearing more from Davis. This modest memoir makes it clear why even her opponents should pay attention to...
Texas gubernatorial candidate Davis delivers a political biography that is better—in part because it’s better written, in part because it’s more heartfelt—than most books of its kind.
Davis burst onto the national stage last year with a carefully mounted filibuster of the Texas Senate “to defeat an anti-abortion bill, giving voice to thousands and thousands of women pleading to preserve their access to lifesaving health care and reproductive rights.” Among the news that emerges from the book, and by artful design, is the fact that Davis herself had to have recourse to the procedure due to an ectopic pregnancy that required removal of a fallopian tube, “which in Texas is technically considered an abortion, and doctors have to report it as such.” Hard-line anti-abortion activists probably won’t be swayed by Davis’ thoughtful, somber account of the tragedy, but it is affecting and unsentimental. Her account of her peripatetic, shy childhood (“I was not an expected child and my parents didn’t greet the news with great happiness”) is similarly moving. Rather more rote is her account of college and law school. Though she worked harder than most as a young mother without much in the way of family resources, all the expected tropes are there: the feeling of being the smartest kid in the class on arriving at Harvard and the dumbest within five minutes or so, the backbreaking toughness of contracts class. Davis’ recollection is that she threw herself into politics without much preparation, without having nursed a long desire to be president or a congresswoman, but it’s clear from her accounts of maneuvering through various bills and factions that she’s good at horse trading. She’s good at writing, too, and her closing account of that famed filibuster is a dramatic, textbook case of how to play hardball.
Doubtless we’ll be hearing more from Davis. This modest memoir makes it clear why even her opponents should pay attention to her.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-399-17057-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 10, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2014
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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