A solid summary of Truman’s life and presidency that is ultimately too cursory to provide much deep analysis or reading...
Concise biography of the 33rd Chief Executive by one of the nation’s preeminent presidential historians.
It is an odd irony of history that Truman, who during and immediately after his presidency was reviled as a mediocre and corrupt ward heeler, has been reevaluated as a man of principle and one of the great presidents of the 20th century. Dallek (Nixon and Kissinger, 2007, etc.) seems to agree in the introduction to this slim volume, which places the Missourian among the “great or near-great” presidents—a thesis the author ignores for the rest of the book, as Truman blunders his way through one crisis after another and is seemingly outmaneuvered at every turn. Perhaps Dallek can be forgiven, since this entry in the American Presidents series summarizes previous historians’ work and is not intended to revise or add much to the scholarly discourse. Thus, we get Truman deciding to go into politics as a young man partially because it afforded him a steadier income than running a haberdashery. The most gripping part of the book occurs not in 1948, when Truman defeated Dewey in one of the greatest upsets in political history, but three years earlier, when Eleanor Roosevelt summoned him to the White House and handed him the reins of power after the death of her husband. Truman proved to be vastly unprepared for the job and quite unhappy in it. In the president’s defense, Dallek points out that it was a tough assignment: The end of World War II rent huge holes in America’s social fabric; the tenuous alliance with the Soviets was coming undone; demagogues were stirring up domestic fears of communist infiltration. The chief insight Dallek provides is showing how principle was tempered by political calculation as Truman navigated this new universe.
A solid summary of Truman’s life and presidency that is ultimately too cursory to provide much deep analysis or reading pleasure.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8050-6938-9
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2008
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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