A text that will serve both as a solid reference work and as a milepost in the evolving and ever changing reputations of our...
A C-SPAN publication that employs surveys of historians to rank the American presidents, featuring lightly edited transcripts of interviews with historians who have published about each POTUS.
Because Donald Trump has not yet completed his term, he is not included in the rankings, but near the end, there is a transcript of a conversation among three historians about him—a fairly moderate, mostly nonjudgmental conversation. The pieces about each president are generally uniform in length (a dozen pages or so) and include basic biographical information with a justification for the reason that he has achieved his status. Unsurprisingly, Lincoln is at the top and James Buchanan at the bottom. Among the pleasures of the texts are the little-known—and sometimes quirky—details about the presidents: George Washington didn’t like to be touched; Teddy Roosevelt saw the last live passenger pigeon; James Monroe nearly fought a duel with Alexander Hamilton; John Quincy Adams loved the work of Lord Byron. Also intriguing are the factoids that do not appear—e.g., the chapter on Franklin Pierce doesn’t mention that Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote his campaign biography and that Pierce was with the author of The Scarlet Letter when he died. The issue of slavery comes up continually—no surprise since many of the early presidents owned slaves—and some writers try to soften this by mentioning how this was another time. Some of the contributors who deal with the low-ranking presidents (Harding, Pierce, Buchanan, and others) manage to find some things to admire: Harding appointed a great Cabinet; Buchanan was highly qualified. The contributor list is impressive: Douglas Brinkley, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Harold Holzer, David Maraniss, Robert Caro, Amity Shlaes, Evan Thomas, and Edna Greene Medford, among many others.
A text that will serve both as a solid reference work and as a milepost in the evolving and ever changing reputations of our presidents.Pub Date: April 23, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5417-7433-9
Page Count: 560
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2019
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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