Amid the stream of JFK books to be released for the centennial, this work should emerge as one of the most complete and...
Smith (Sloan School of Management/MIT), John F. Kennedy’s nephew, and Brinkley (History/Rice Univ.; Rightful Heritage: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Land of America, 2016, etc.) assemble a large collection of material by and about the late president.
Coinciding with the centennial of JFK’s birth, May 29, this volume presents speeches and accompanying commentaries from a wide range of public figures. The book is organized chronologically, briefly covering JFK’s early years, the senatorial period, 1960 presidential campaign, each of the three years in the White House, and finally his legacy. The famous speeches are included: the inaugural address, the televised update on the Cuban missile crisis, the vision for space exploration set forth at Rice University, the Ich bin ein Berliner speech, and the civil rights report of 1963. Less-well-known speeches also are here, including JFK’s address to the New York Liberal Party, entitled “Definition of a Liberal,” and the role of the artist in American society, delivered at Amherst College shortly before his death. The speeches are well-written, often elegant. They usually exuded optimism and provided a tutorial on the issues and offered solutions on the most important national challenges. Many are as timely today as they were more than a half-century ago. Enhancing these primary sources are analyses from such diverse analysts as presidential historians Robert Dallek and Michael Beschloss, politicians Elizabeth Warren and John McCain, and entertainers Dick Cavett and Robert Redford. The book is an unabashed celebration of JFK, but the speeches stand alone, and the commentary is insightful. The editors have assembled hundreds of complementary photos, most of them uncommon, enhancing the overall presentation, and the book is packed with other notable contributors, including George Packer, Norman Mailer, Dave Eggers, Joseph Ellis, Samantha Power, and Gloria Steinem.
Amid the stream of JFK books to be released for the centennial, this work should emerge as one of the most complete and useful.Pub Date: May 2, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-266884-4
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
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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