Entertaining and informative reading for politics junkies, though not as meaty as Katy Tur’s Unbelievable, reporting on the...
A decade on the campaign trail with Hillary Clinton.
Journalists, especially political journalists, are not supposed to fall in love with their subjects. Chozick, who has covered politics for the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, has a simple explanation: “Usually by the final stretch, candidate reporters are so brainwashed from living in the bubble that we all believe our horse will win even if the facts say otherwise.” The picture did not resolve until Election Day, but the signs were there: Clinton, whom Chozick covered for years and clearly admires, if critically, never quite got the “common person” meme, the one that allowed Donald Trump to “lick his fingers after eating a bucket of greasy KFC on board his 757 and maintain the aura of the workingman” while portraying Clinton as detached and aloof. As the author writes, there was something to that: For many reasons, Clinton disdained the press, especially the Times, and it took great efforts on the parts of her handlers—who here bear sobriquets like Brown Loafers, Policy Guy, Hired Gun, and Outsider Guy—to get Clinton anywhere near a reporter if she could help it. Chozick’s narrative, stretching over Clinton’s two campaigns, is, like the campaigns themselves, a blend of the fraught and the bland: too many buffets and too much alcohol here, breaking news and critical moments there. One sharp-edged portrait of the candidate comes when Bernie Sanders begins to pummel her in the primaries. “Hillary became sullen….She is pouty,” writes the author, “and aggrieved but not surprised that the media hadn’t given her rightful due.” Still, Chozick closes on a note of admiration for her difficult quarry, “the Hillary who tried to hold it all together—her marriage, her daughter, her career, her gender, her country.”
Entertaining and informative reading for politics junkies, though not as meaty as Katy Tur’s Unbelievable, reporting on the other side.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-241359-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 26, 2018
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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