A workmanlike biography of a relatively minor character in the vast Roosevelt saga.
Biography of Theodore Roosevelt’s first son, Ted Jr. (1887-1944), who made a greater soldier than politician.
Next to that of his father, the story of Ted Jr. makes fairly lackluster reading, although the eldest son was similarly athletic, enthusiastic, and brave. According to Brady (A Death in San Pietro: The Untold Story of Ernie Pyle, John Huston, and the Fight for Purple Heart Valley, 2013, etc.), the dean of the School of Aviation at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Ted proved himself courageously on the battlefield in both world wars. However, he lost his hour in the political arena as a Republican (like his father) with the rises of his older cousin Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Democratic juggernaut. The author does not supply much of his own psychological dissection of Ted’s character, but he notes how the undersized youth with a “wayward” right eye and an early pugnacious behavior was clearly trying very hard to make his Rough Rider father proud. Roosevelt Sr. gently but firmly squelched his son’s desire to attend West Point—such was the president’s legendary ability to persuade and inspire awe—yet Brady hardly questions the young Harvard graduate’s decision to take a menial position in a carpet factory. Perhaps there was a stronger influence by his starchy, no-nonsense mother Edith than is indicated here. The breakout of war (both times) seemed to have saved Ted from obscurity, and his heroic actions in both wars gained him awards of valor. Moreover, Ted was instrumental in establishing the American Legion to honor all veterans (not just veterans of foreign wars) after WWI. Ultimately, as the author underscores, the rivalry between the Oyster Bay Roosevelts and the Hyde Park Roosevelts determined the political fate of Ted Jr.
A workmanlike biography of a relatively minor character in the vast Roosevelt saga.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-101-98815-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: New American Library
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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