An entertaining, enlightening look at an administration that was never dull.
An oral biography of the Barack Obama administration, culled from interviews conducted between May 2016 and October 2017.
Abrams (Die Hard: An Oral History, 2016, etc.) takes snippets from his interviews with all the players in this real-life drama, from the election through the end of the administration. The flowing narrative includes revealing insights from a wide variety of both Democratic and Republican politicians, speechwriters, attorneys, and others, from David Axelrod to the West Wing receptionist. Readers experience the first campaign and the many attendant doubts, starting with the uncertainty about whether Obama could even win the nomination. Success meant the team had to go into overdrive, and that’s what they did, taking on an economic collapse, the fraught stimulus bill, stabilizing the Middle East cease-fire, and a promise from Republicans that they would never compromise and would fight the Democrats on everything. Luckily, Obama had a great team working with him, most of whom would do anything he asked of them. That was a trait that held throughout the administration, as people who were burned out by life in Washington, D.C., took on even more assignments just because the president asked them. The author effectively shows the incredible patience exhibited by the president and the invaluable help proffered by Vice President Joe Biden, whose 30 years of experience in Washington provided that extra push when it was required (often). Unfortunately, Republicans were sworn to a policy of obstructionism and manipulation of the legislative process, and the frustrations of the president and his staff are abundantly clear throughout the narrative. At the beginning of the book, Abrams lists the “participants” and their titles; in the appendix, the author provides a complete listing of all of the staff members during Obama’s terms in office. Though technically “unauthorized,” Abrams put in the work with his dozens of interviews, and he also “received cooperation from the Obama White House, the Obama Foundation, and the postpresidency Office of Barack and Michelle Obama.”
An entertaining, enlightening look at an administration that was never dull.Pub Date: July 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5039-5166-2
Page Count: 500
Publisher: Little A
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
PROFILES
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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