Personal reflections meet large-scale history, most satisfyingly.
A slender volume on that most unslender of subjects, Winston Churchill.
Memoirist, historian, journalist, soldier, traveler and leader, Churchill committed millions of words to print and generated millions more by other hands. Indeed, writes prolific historian Johnson (Heroes: From Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar to Churchill and de Gaulle, 2007, etc.), “I calculate his total of words in print, including published speeches, to be between 8 and 10 million words.” So slim a treatment of the portly prose master would seem unusual, but Johnson seemingly has a purpose in mind—to use Churchill’s life as a kind of self-improvement scheme for the rest of us, who have not the opportunity to go steaming off to Gallipoli or escape from the Boers. The author measures Churchill’s successes on a broad beam—whence his observation that while Churchill drank like a sailor on shore leave for most of his life, “his liver, inspected after his death, was found to be as perfect as a young child’s.” Johnson approvingly notes Churchill’s habit of casting about widely for learned opinion but keeping his own counsel, making difficult decisions and accepting responsibility for failures as well as successes. Johnson presents a fully rounded character who used the F-word from time to time, though never to Nixonian excess, who learned as he went and who managed to retain principle while acting as a practical politician. The author closes with a list of ten big lessons that Churchill can teach, some very specific (use airpower whenever possible) and some more applicable to ordinary lives (work hard, forge alliances, get your priorities straight).
Personal reflections meet large-scale history, most satisfyingly.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-670-02105-5
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2009
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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