Mostly engaging, and Webber saves the best for last: Martin Luther King Jr.’s words and cadences moved an entire nation, and...
Episcopal priest Webber (American to the Backbone: The Life of James W.C. Pennington, the Fugitive Slave Who Became One of the First Black Abolitionists, 2011) traces America’s search for personal freedom through the men and women whose voices still demand our attention.
The author follows some of our best orators, from Patrick Henry and Daniel Webster to Martin Luther King Jr. and Ronald Reagan, and he successfully shows how differently and yet how alike this struggle has been over the years. While Henry sought freedom from central government, Webster was committed to the same; they both sought personal freedom and feared too much power in any one place. The book gets a bit dry as the author moves into the abolitionists and suffragists. They fought to end slavery and create a free life for African-Americans and rallied against the death penalty and child labor along the way. The women who worked with them saw their own lack of freedom and fought for the vote and the right to own property, giving birth to the suffragist cause. The most interesting part of the book is the way Webber traces the seeds of ideas, the sources and connections as they are repeated through the years. Abraham Lincoln asked the same questions as Webster about preserving the Union, and he paraphrased Webster’s words in the ending of the Gettysburg Address: “of the people, by the people….” Adlai Stevenson used Lincoln’s “house divided” in a Cold War–era speech. Ronald Reagan’s trickle-down theory came straight from William Jennings Bryan. All these men and women spoke of freedom as a goal for all, and each dealt with the economic factors that controlled freedom: poverty, taxes and inequality.
Mostly engaging, and Webber saves the best for last: Martin Luther King Jr.’s words and cadences moved an entire nation, and he, like the other orators, used his voice for the millions who had none.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-1605986333
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Sept. 10, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2014
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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