Well done. An engaging dual biography of a most intriguing power couple.
A touching, sympathetic portrait of a successful marriage despite the agony and the stress, emphasizing Lady Bird Johnson’s spectacular inner grit.
As an accomplished biographer of several works on presidential wives (The Roosevelt Women, 1998, etc.), Caroli does an impressive job refuting the “doormat” reputation of a humiliated wife to a coarse, philandering Texan by underscoring the symbiotic relationship that mutually sustained the couple through their whole lives. The only daughter born to a cultured, troubled gentlewoman who died early from mysterious circumstances and a larger-than-life, self-made businessman, Claudia Taylor, aka Lady Bird (1912-2007), learned a great deal from her pragmatic, number-crunching father—namely, to be self-sufficient and unafraid to take risks. Meeting former Texas schoolteacher Lyndon Johnson and then running Texas Congressman Richard Kleberg’s Washington office, in 1934, Lady Bird resisted being swept off her feet by the blustering, ambitious young man, who pressured her into marriage, sensing she had the “emotional ballast he needed to achieve his ambition.” Indeed, the leitmotiv here is that Lady Bird provided the necessary counterbalance to Johnson’s often overweening narcissism, which revealed itself in abusive, self-pitying outbursts that only she could smooth out. His outsized ambition in Congress and the Senate allowed her a place at the table, and she became a highly effective political tool for her husband’s career. Moreover, she used her business acumen to take part in a series of forward-seeing investments in radio and TV in the 1940s that made the couple rich. Caroli creates a vibrant portrait of a first lady who liked campaigning and learned how to speak publicly and effectively. Once her husband became vice president, she teamed up with Jackie Kennedy to shine as a political spouse when her husband was floundering. Unlike Bess Truman or Mamie Eisenhower, Lady Bird was not about to keep her mouth shut, turning her husband’s chronic philandering to her advantage.
Well done. An engaging dual biography of a most intriguing power couple.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4391-9122-4
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
