And as to Vince Foster, and Whitewater, and rumors of Sapphic revels, and vengeful calculation, and overweening ambition?...
A layered, thoughtful, critical biography of the woman who, at this writing, seems poised to become the 44th president of the United States.
Hillary Clinton, to read between of-Watergate-fame Bernstein’s (Loyalties: A Son’s Memoir, 1991, etc.) lines, is a political cyborg, clinically devoted to remaking her image in order to appear to best political advantage, quick to shed ideology for expedience. Many of those who knew her in the White House, as first lady, consider her intellectually outclassed by her foxy husband, himself no stranger to image-remaking and self-serving expedience; her strengths there lay in organization and hard work, not in dazzling displays of dialectic. Bernstein lays many of her husband’s failures, but not failings, at her door, “not just her botched handling of their health care agenda, or the ethical cloud hovering like a pall over their administration, but so many of the stumbles and falls responsible for sweeping in the Congress led by Newt Gingrich in 1994 and ending the ambitious phase of their presidency.” A vast right-wing conspiracy faces Hillary, to be sure. It always has, beginning with her father, hypercritical and oppressive; happily, Bernstein resists the temptation to practice psychobiography without a license, but the influence on her adult life seems fairly clear even without such commentary. (Welfare reform? Tell it to a father who refused to give her an allowance because she already ate and slept for free.) Bernstein attributes to Clinton, too, a rather grim ethic of salvation through work, and he well documents her essential conservatism and humorlessness; the spice in all that is the thought that it is her job to save her husband from himself, despising his weakness all the while, even as the two formed “a single, intertwined governmental and martial power,” one that may continue after a Bush interregnum.
And as to Vince Foster, and Whitewater, and rumors of Sapphic revels, and vengeful calculation, and overweening ambition? Never fear: They’re all to be found in Bernstein’s revealing, admiring, often surprising book.Pub Date: June 5, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-375-40766-6
Page Count: 604
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2024 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.
