More than 35 years after leaving office, Brownell recalls serving as campaign adviser and attorney general for the man ``head and shoulders above all the other political figures I have ever encountered'': Dwight D. Eisenhower. In many ways, Brownell's autobiography—with an assist from Burke (Political Science/University of Vermont)—could serve as the credo of the ``Wall Street wing'' of socially moderate, internationalist Republicans once epitomized by Thomas Dewey (whose two runs for the presidency Brownell guided as campaign manager) and Nelson Rockefeller. In several years as a New York State assemblyman in the 1930's, the reforming young lawyer and Nebraska native learned not to ``denounce one's opponents too strongly or two personally''; indeed, his only real pique here is vented at fiercely partisan Democrats Harry Truman and FDR, including the dark hint that the latter might have lost the 1944 election but for coverups of his health and of alleged negligence at Pearl Harbor. Although these memoirs also cover the Dewey campaigns and Brownell's 62 years of private law practice, the most compelling sections deal with the Eisenhower years. Brownell is most revealing about the hush-hush communications and climactic secret meeting that led the general to seek the 1952 GOP nomination; how Ike came to appoint Earl Warren to the Supreme Court; and the author's own key support for the awakening civil-rights movement. Throughout, Brownell displays intelligence, respect for public service, and shrewdness in assessing how his nonpolitician boss built a cohesive team and retained the affection of the American people. But his narrative is inhibited by a lawyerly reluctance to reveal anything too damaging to his ``client'' (for example, Brownell's contention that Ike was not trying to dump Nixon by offering him a Cabinet post is pure spin-control). Despite the reticence: an important memoir likely to bolster Eisenhower's evolving reputation for above-the-fray, ``hidden- hand'' leadership. (Twenty-six b&w photos—not seen)
Pub Date: May 3, 1993
ISBN: 0-7006-0590-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Univ. Press of Kansas
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1993
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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