A skillful psychobiography by an empathetic scholar.
A scholar of American history builds on previous biographies of Harry Truman to offer her own interpretation of his career.
Donald (Lion in the White House: A Life of Theodore Roosevelt, 2007), the former editor in chief of Harvard University Press, was fascinated by Truman's ascendancy to the presidency near the end of World War II. However, she felt that previous biographies (e.g., David McCullough’s Truman and Alonzo L. Hamby’s A Man of the People), despite their overall excellence, failed to emphasize certain of his character qualities. Compared to other Truman biographers, Donald emphasizes the psychology of the man to a greater extent and the outward actions of the man to a lesser extent. She delves into the countervailing influences of Truman's strong mother and weaker father; the future president's despair at spending a decade on the family farm, trying but failing to make it prosperous; the leadership qualities he developed during World War I; his epic love for his wife and total devotion to his daughter; his ability to maintain his personal integrity while struggling with the corrupt political machine of Kansas City; and the forces behind his decision to initiate a nuclear attack on Japan to end WWII. Donald argues that Truman's psychological state while a senator from Missouri opens vital vistas on his performance as an accidental president, and her most searing insight involves Truman's loyalty to family, to political allies and to soldiers with whom he served. That intense loyalty, writes the author, led him to make some personally and politically harmful decisions.
A skillful psychobiography by an empathetic scholar.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-465-03120-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: July 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2012
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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