For the general reader, a fair introduction to two towering personalities and to the 20th-century landscape before it turned...
How Britain’s playboy king and America’s cowboy president forged the modern Anglo-American partnership.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the great powers of Europe scrambled to form new alliances to advance their imperial ambitions. France and Britain formed the Entente Cordiale, “a loose arrangement…settling a wide range of controversies that had plagued relations between them for years.” A genuine player in world affairs for the first time, the United States abandoned its antagonism to the British Empire and embraced an alliance among the English-speaking peoples. Fromkin (International Relations, History, Law/Boston Univ.; Europe’s Last Summer: Who Started the Great War in 1914?, 2004, etc.) acknowledges that this rearrangement of the world’s diplomatic furniture was an almost predictable response to the threat posed by Germany’s unstable Kaiser Wilhelm to the traditional European balance of power. Further, the author concedes that neither Theodore Roosevelt nor Edward VII were entirely in control of their nations’ foreign policies and that, in any event, forces much larger than individual personalities shaped events. Still, yoking the two men as “secret partners” gives Fromkin sufficient excuse to throw bouquets at two successful, in many ways unlikely, leaders about whom many of their countrymen remained deeply skeptical. Through his mother Queen Victoria, “Bertie” was literally the uncle of all Europe, known primarily for his love of pleasure, France, fashion and women. Famously a cowboy and Rough Rider, the bellicose Roosevelt became, following McKinley’s assassination, America’s youngest president. Fromkin’s profiles explain the origins of each man’s public image, but also demonstrate that Roosevelt was more than “a mannerless savage,” Edward more than “a mindless playboy,” caricatures dear to their contemporaries perhaps, but long since dismissed by historians. How the global aspirations of each happily intersected at the 1906 Algeciras Conference serves as the narrative climax, but too much is merely asserted for the thesis to be entirely persuasive.
For the general reader, a fair introduction to two towering personalities and to the 20th-century landscape before it turned toxic.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59420-187-5
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
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
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