A masterly biography of the redneck messiah who, before he was assassinated in 1935 at age 42, played a leading role on the US political stage. Setting Long and his Louisiana regime in the post- Reconstruction context of America's Deep South, Hair (History/Georgia College) provides an unsparing, albeit scrupulously documented, account of a backwoods pol whose will to power almost defies belief. The author's interpretive analysis of the self-styled Kingfish's rise and violent end represents a persuasive challenge to the standard 1969 reference (Huey Long) by T. Harry Williams, who credited the charismatic Long with a measure of benign intent. By contrast, the author portrays the politician as a calculating control freak, essentially contemptuous of his fellow man, for whom politics was a blood sport. A son of landed yeomanry, Long spent his young manhood as a traveling salesman for patent medicines and other dubious products. Having crammed his way past the bar exam, the high-school dropout practiced law for a while, soon winning a seat on Louisiana's Public Service Commission. The governorship followed, allowing Long to begin turning Louisiana into a personal fiefdom. Playing the patronage game, he rewarded friends and punished enemies, and promoted laws that made Louisiana a virtual police state. Even after surviving impeachment proceedings and moving on to the US Senate in 1932, Long retained his regional as well as local influence. A spellbinding orator, he made no secret of his presidential ambitions. Having cobbled together a populist coalition whose adherents encompassed the radical, racist likes of Gerald L.K. Smith and Fr. Charles E. Coughlin, he had a third-party candidate's plausible chance at the White House. But the dream (or nightmare) died in a hail of gunfire—and Hair leaves little doubt that the country was the better for the untimely demise of a rabble-rousing demagogue. A consistently engrossing portrait of a despot who sowed discontent among the electorate's disaffected and reaped the whirlwind just as he was hitting his stride. (Illustrations—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-8071-1700-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Louisiana State Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1991
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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