The long-awaited first installment of Henry's History has finally arrived and, advertising hype aside, it is an event. Beginning with the call from Richard Nixon in 1969—ironically, while Kissinger was lunching with Nelson Rockefeller—that brought him into national prominence, and ending with the signing of the Paris accords on Vietnam in 1972, this segment inevitably centers on the Vietnam War, with side-trips to Moscow and China. Much attention will be paid to the nuts and bolts of negotiations between the U.S. and North Vietnam, the beginnings of détente, the secret mission to Peking, and the Mideast maneuvers of the period, as well as to Kissinger's profiles of colleagues and of Nixon. But one of those profiles may provide a clue to this maze of words; in speaking of then-Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird, Kissinger notes that Laird would raise a host of issues in order to camouflage the main issue on which he wanted to prevail in inter-departmental wrangling. Kissinger's appreciation of Laird's bureaucratic acumen may be reflected in the massive scale of this book, fully 1500 pages in all. But the layers of meetings, memoranda, and reflection can't hide its basic value; this is one of the great documents of today's amoral, antidemocratic political manipulation. Kissinger claims, for instance, that he originally intended to maintain the structure of the National Security Council as he found it, but that Nixon, suspicious of the Foreign Service, insisted on strengthening the NSC as his instrument. Later—in reference to presumed disagreements between him and Nixon over the Christmas bombing of Hanoi in 1971—he claims disingenuously that "a Presidential Assistant soon learns that his only strength is the President's confidence"; but the intervening 1450 pages have shown us a Kissinger who knew how to institutionalize his power, and who, in the end, outmaneuvered even Richard Nixon. Kissinger's amorality is apparent from the start, as he never questions the propriety of accepting a position with the Nixon Administration after extolling the virtues of Rockefeller; the only question was which position to go for. Later, he could claim that "Cambodia was not a moral issue." But the greatest example may be Chile, where Kissinger justifies covert actions against Allende because his election was based "only" on a plurality—and, in any event, "was a challenge to our national interest," solely on the basis of his Marxist ideology. For Kissinger, values are ideology, power is truth. Though he wrings his hands over the "poor Cambodians" and those killed in Vietnam, his commitment was to American international "credibility" and effectiveness. For those not snowed by the erudition and charm, then, this is a fundamentally important book.
Pub Date: Oct. 23, 1979
ISBN: 1451636431
Page Count: 2155
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1979
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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