A professed liberal’s assessment of the rise, reign and enduring legacy of William F. Buckley (1925–2008), the godfather of the modern conservative movement.
Bogus (Law/Roger Williams Univ.; Why Lawsuits are Good for America: Disciplined Democracy, Big Business, and the Common Law, 2001, etc.) offers not a traditional cradle-to-grave biography but an ongoing conversation about and argument with Buckley—with long (often overlong) asides explaining the historical contexts of events involving his subject. The author admires Buckley as profoundly as he disagrees with him. He praises him throughout for his humor, prolificacy, energy, writing, debating and managerial skills and devotion to his family and causes. But for Buckley’s principal ideas, which, Bogus writes repeatedly, came directly from his father, he has much disagreement and even disdain. Nonetheless, he recognizes that Buckley changed American history, “a feat so great that it is almost impossible to overstate.” Bogus writes about Buckley’s influence on Ronald Reagan, Karl Rove, Rush Limbaugh and numerous others, and he shows how Buckley assembled a team that propelled National Review into a position of influence. The author revisits Buckley’s father’s involvement in the Mexican Revolution (he met Pancho Villa), swiftly summarizes Buckley’s education, his early writings and his efforts to avoid combat in World War II and Korea. He establishes the primacy of religion in Buckley’s weltanschauung and chronicles his awkward, tone-deaf writing about civil rights, his symbolic run for mayor of New York, his advocacy of wars in Vietnam and elsewhere and his moves to distance NR from the Birchers and other extremists. A disagreeing but rarely disagreeable argument with a figure far easier to debate on the page than in person.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-59691-580-0
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2011
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
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