Refreshingly candid about his vindictive motives, Raymond offers a damning chronicle of political hubris.
One of the Northeast GOP’s top campaigners tells how he became an agent of corruption for the Republican revolution.
Raymond’s great-grandfather, John Thomas Underwood, founded the famous typewriter company, and while the author’s share of that fortune ensured that he’d never go hungry, “family pride—hell, my own pride—ensured that I’d never be some yacht-hopping scion.” After graduating from college in 1989 and spending a few desultory years in PR, he wandered into the Graduate School of Political Management. Based at the time in New York City, GSPM pushed a militaristic, Machiavellian approach to the business that was seductive to a drifter like Raymond: “I wanted to pick a fight, have a fight, and win a fight.” For little apparent ideological reason, he went to work for the Republicans in New Jersey; later he ran a doomed campaign for a pro-choice GOP Philadelphia socialite with more friends than smarts. Raymond climbed the party ladder during the heady post-Gingrich days, when the very thought of compromise could infuriate the new South-centric Republican leadership, whose campaign rhetoric he derides as “pro-life, snake-handling babble.” It’s surprising at first to hear such criticisms from a highly placed operative in the Republican National Committee, but it becomes markedly less so once Raymond gets to the crux of the matter: how he was hung out to dry and went to jail for following orders to jam Democratic volunteers’ phone lines. As he states early on, “In GOP circles in 2002 it seemed preposterous that anything you did to win an election could be considered a crime.” He saw the light in prison and decided to tell the American voters about the dirty tricks he practiced, which he sees growing ever more common. “Now what are you going to do about it?” he asks.
Refreshingly candid about his vindictive motives, Raymond offers a damning chronicle of political hubris.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4165-5222-2
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2008
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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