A thoroughly researched biography of a remarkable figure.
The story of a dynamic political outsider who mounted a formidable challenge to Franklin D. Roosevelt for the presidency.
In 1940, Roosevelt was deciding whether to run for a third term, a war in Europe was raging, inflaming debate about whether the U.S. should join, and the Republican Party was looking desperately for a candidate who could take back the presidency. The man they chose was Indiana-born Wendell Willkie (1892-1944), a wealthy businessman with no political experience but considerable charm and who only recently had changed party affiliation. “He’ll go down as the darkest horse in the stable for 1940,” said one political commentator. Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Lewis (Emeritus, History/New York Univ.; W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography, 2009, etc.), who was awarded the National Humanities Medal, draws on abundant archival and published material to create a spirited portrait of the charismatic, outspoken Willkie, who took the political spotlight from 1940 until his death four years later. Time magazine founder Henry Luce called Willkie “a force of nature”; decades later, historian David Halberstam characterized him as “the rarest of things in those days, a Republican with sex appeal.” Willkie was forthright in his criticism of FDR, who Willkie claimed curtailed the Bill of Rights, fomented class conflict, undermined business (as president of a major utility company, Willkie was a fierce opponent of the Tennessee Valley Authority and other New Deal programs), and was itching to involve America in another war. Willkie felt no party loyalty but, Lewis asserts, embraced a “creed of liberalism” that “opposed equally unregulated wealth and unlimited government power.” He drew exuberant crowds as he campaigned across the country, and polls showed the election too close to call. Willkie lost to FDR but only by 5 million votes. Post-election, Willkie and FDR became close allies, and after he returned from a fact-finding trip to Europe at FDR’s request, Willkie became a strong interventionist. Lewis recounts Willkie’s prescient views of the postwar world as well as his staunch civil rights advocacy.
A thoroughly researched biography of a remarkable figure.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-87140-457-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
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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