A fine account of FDR’s rise to power combined with a cradle-to-grave biography of the man who made it possible.
Two giants of 20th-century American politics receive an insightful dual biography.
Franklin Roosevelt (1882-1945) is no stranger to historians, but Politico senior editor Golway (Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics, 2014, etc.) wisely wraps matters up after he became president in 1933. Until then, fellow New Yorker Al Smith (1873-1944) was better known. Born on the Lower East Side, Smith struggled financially, but he impressed the local Tammany boss, who sent him to Albany in 1904 as assemblyman. Though initially frustrated by bureaucracy, he hid “his frustration behind a mask of good cheer” and became a leading reformer. Wealthy and bored by practicing law, Roosevelt fell in love with politics. Winning a state Senate seat in 1910, he concentrated on national affairs, supporting Woodrow Wilson in 1912 and earning appointment as Assistant Secretary of the Navy. Golway dates the “alliance” to the 1920 Democratic presidential convention, when Smith, then the governor of New York, asked Roosevelt to second his nomination. Quiescent for years after his 1921 paralysis, Roosevelt supported Smith for governor in 1922, 1924, and 1926. Running for president in 1928, Smith convinced Roosevelt to run for governor. Roosevelt’s victory immediately made him a contender for 1932. It also ended their alliance. Crushed by his defeat, Smith felt ignored by the new governor. Detesting Roosevelt’s New Deal, he supported Alfred Landon in 1936 and Wendell Willkie in 1940. Historians, Golway included, agree that Smith was the more forthright, unwilling to sacrifice ideals for political gain. Thus, both men hated Prohibition. Roosevelt gets credit for repeal in 1933 when support had weakened, but he waffled when it would lose votes during the 1920s. Smith never wavered, but it cost him.
A fine account of FDR’s rise to power combined with a cradle-to-grave biography of the man who made it possible.Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-08964-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
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
SEEN & HEARD
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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