Though necessarily biased, this is a highly thoughtful, thorough exploration of the grindingly slow workings of national...
A member of the Barack Obama administration reviews his eight years with the president with a mixture of pride and regret.
Rhodes, whose official title was Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communication, was 29 and working at a Washington, D.C., think tank when he joined Obama's campaign team and then his administration. During that time, he was with Obama almost daily and wrote numerous speeches for the president, including the Nobel Peace Prize speech in which Obama spoke of the gap between “the world as it is” and “the world as it ought to be.” It's the former that takes center stage here, as Rhodes, in brief but information-packed chapters, describes the ways in which idealism—his more than the pragmatic president's—is ground down by the reality of deeply stubborn governments and institutions. Moving chronologically through Obama's two terms, the author clearly describes the president's responses to crises around the world, including those in Egypt, Syria, and Libya, and his own role in shaping Obama's response to a host of critical issues. Frustrated with playing only the role of mouthpiece, Rhodes began to take a larger role in shaping the relationships between the United States and nations like Cuba and Burma as the years went on, while still “wrestl[ing] with the concern that I was losing myself inside the experience, transformed into a cipher for the needs of this other person, who was, after all, a politician, playing the role of U.S. President.” Though he reveals a few details about Obama, including his affection for Nicorette gum and Scrabble and his occasional indulgence in anger directed at those working most closely with him, this is no tell-all. The narrative is a serious, even somber, inside look at the forces at work inside—and outside—a presidency.
Though necessarily biased, this is a highly thoughtful, thorough exploration of the grindingly slow workings of national security and the inevitable compromises of government.Pub Date: June 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-50935-6
Page Count: 484
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: June 25, 2018
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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