Dramatic and revealing. Readers unfamiliar with the Joe Kennedy back story will be startled to learn of his puppet...
The making of war hero John F. Kennedy.
On Aug. 2, 1943, during the fighting in the South Pacific, a Japanese destroyer rammed PT-109, splitting the radarless torpedo boat in half, killing two sailors, and leaving 11 survivors in a fiery inferno, including its young skipper, JFK. The ensuing seven-day survival ordeal “forever transformed” Kennedy and paved the way for his elections to Congress (1947) and the presidency (1961). In this fast-paced narrative, veteran nonfiction writer Doyle (co-author: Navy SEALs: Their Untold Story, 2014, etc.) tells the familiar story of the charismatic JFK’s inspiring wartime leadership, offering no revelations but plenty of context. Just the year before, Joe Kennedy, master manipulator, patriarch of the superwealthy family, and former U.S. ambassador to England, had summoned an earlier PT boat hero, John Bulkeley, who had famously helped Gen. Douglas MacArthur escape from the Philippines, to a private meeting in Manhattan’s Plaza hotel, where he prevailed upon Bulkeley to help get young JFK into the PT boat service—for the publicity and to get the veteran’s vote after the war. As fate would have it, JFK’s survival in the Solomon Islands “transfigured [him] almost overnight into a war hero.” He then became a national “pop culture icon” when writer John Hersey’s lengthy account of the episode appeared in the New Yorker and, in condensed form, in Reader’s Digest—all with help from Joe Kennedy. The PT-109 story became a mainstay of JFK’s political campaigns, during which he saluted the heroics of his surviving crew members. A PT-109 float carried his shipmates in his presidential inaugural parade. “Without PT 109,” said a longtime aid, “there never would have been a President John F. Kennedy.”
Dramatic and revealing. Readers unfamiliar with the Joe Kennedy back story will be startled to learn of his puppet master–like role in orchestrating JFK’s rise to the presidency.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-234658-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2015
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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