Despite plenty of warts, Hitchcock’s Eisenhower was a hardworking, skillful president. Jean Edward Smith’s Eisenhower in War...
A lengthy, well-documented argument that “the era from the end of the Second World War up to the presidency of John F. Kennedy deserves to be known as the Age of Eisenhower.”
Throughout his presidency (1953-1961), most commentators considered Dwight Eisenhower “a lightweight, an amateur, an orthodox pro-business do-nothing president, a lazy leader who, despite all his grinning, was often callous and distant, more interested in golf than governing.” In the decades since, his reputation has risen spectacularly, and this measured, mostly admiring biography by Hitchcock (History/Univ. of Virginia; The Bitter Road to Freedom: A New History of the Liberation of Europe, 2008) does not rock the boat. In his campaign promises, Eisenhower expressed the importance of ending the Korean War, battling communism, and balancing the budget. He accomplished all three, but the details are often unsettling. He considered using atomic weapons to break the Korean stalemate. Luckily, Stalin died in the spring of 1953, and his successors felt the war was a distraction. Eisenhower despised Joseph McCarthy, but once the senator self-destructed, the administration embraced his red-hunting agenda. The last Republican to give balancing the budget priority, Eisenhower succeeded three times and barely missed five times. Modestly opposed to discrimination, he enforced desegregation in the District of Columbia and armed forces. However, unnerved by Southern outrage when the Supreme Court ended school segregation, he confined himself to platitudes on law and order and discouraged Attorney General Herbert Brownell from enforcing it. Hitchcock praises Eisenhower for avoiding nuclear war when many colleagues yearned to get on with it, but he criticizes his enthusiasm for covert operations which, even when successful, proved calamitous. An internationalist who expanded many of Franklin Roosevelt’s social programs, he never won over traditional conservatives in the party. “Modern Republicanism” peaked with Eisenhower, marked time with Nixon and Ford, crashed with Reagan, and never recovered.
Despite plenty of warts, Hitchcock’s Eisenhower was a hardworking, skillful president. Jean Edward Smith’s Eisenhower in War and Peace (2012) remains the best modern biography, but Hitchcock’s is a worthy competitor.Pub Date: March 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4391-7566-8
Page Count: 672
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 4, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
