For good and ill—and, at times, to her husband’s chagrin—Nellie Taft was far from the standard-issue first lady. Anthony...
“Unconventional” is right: a pleasing biography of a beer-drinking, card-playing, cigarette-smoking presidential wife who insisted on a place at the political table, paving the way for successors such as Eleanor Roosevelt and Hillary Clinton.
Nellie Taft, writes presidential historian/biographer Anthony (The Kennedy White House, 2001, etc.), the wife of Republican stalwart William Howard Taft, initially exercised political power as first among equals in her Cincinnati crowd. She would always be a Cincinnati chauvinist, reminding audiences that Chicago was poorer and Cleveland not worth mentioning; yet she hungered to get out and see the world, and when it appeared that her husband was happy where he was, she pushed him to run for successively more important public offices, finally the presidency. (She also, Anthony suggests, had more than a little to do with keeping the rivalry between Taft and his predecessor and onetime friend Teddy Roosevelt alive: see Patricia O’Toole’s recent When Trumpets Call , p. 39.) Less reform-minded than Roosevelt and perceived by big business as a “sugarplum president,” Taft muddled along, his wife steadily urging him on, but she seems to have opposed the one job he really wanted: Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. She was also quite explicit in using the bully pulpit to advance women’s rights and other progressive issues; indeed, Anthony characterizes both Tafts as proponents of a “version of conservative progressivism” that had sharper teeth than today’s so-called compassionate conservatism. Nellie was personally liberal, which gave the scolds and moralists of her day plenty to cluck about; she also, though, held the usual class prejudices of her time, including old-school anti-Semitism (in Vienna in 1930, she complained that “generally the Jews here are awful, so objectionable”) and strong support for the Emperor of Japan, even as she suspected that Japan would soon go to war with the United States.
For good and ill—and, at times, to her husband’s chagrin—Nellie Taft was far from the standard-issue first lady. Anthony paints a vivid portrait.Pub Date: April 12, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-051382-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2005
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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