Of interest to 20th-century American history buffs and aspiring diplomats.
A well-respected American diplomat looks back on his life and career.
Born in 1930 to a working-class family in Rochester, New York, vanden Heuvel (On His Own: Robert F. Kennedy, 1964-1968, 1970, etc.) grew up in Franklin Roosevelt’s America, and he is one of the greatest champions of FDR’s tidal wave of justice, which he sees as continued during the tenure of Lyndon Johnson. The author attended Deep Springs College, a Western ranch serving as a school to enrich self-governance and develop leadership and public conscience. He continued his education at Cornell University, where he earned a law degree and served as editor-in-chief of the college’s law review. He writes glowingly of his mentors, Roger Baldwin, founder of the American Civil Liberties Union and the International League for Human Rights; and William “Wild Bill” Donovan, the head of the Office of Strategic Services, who gave vanden Heuvel his first position in his law firm. More importantly, Donovan took him as a personal aide when he was appointed ambassador to Thailand, and they were in Saigon to witness the fall of Dien Bien Phu in 1954. The author’s insight into the politics of those fraught times is clear and straightforward, and he provides an interesting look at the civil rights struggles of the 1960s and the “revolution of rising expectations.” Working as a special assistant to Attorney Genereal Robert F. Kennedy, he was tasked with leading school desegregation efforts in Virginia. His days as chair of the New York City Board of Corrections brought the prison crisis of Attica to public view, and as ambassador to the U.N. in Geneva and New York, he delivered a memorable letter decrying the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Though the organization of the book is somewhat scattered, with reproduced speeches dotting the narrative, the author’s career was unquestionably impressive, and his memoir makes for hopeful reading.
Of interest to 20th-century American history buffs and aspiring diplomats.Pub Date: May 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5017-3817-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Cornell Univ.
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
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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