Some readers may not be convinced, but this book deserves a broad audience, especially in our current political climate.
George W. Bush’s secretary of state returns to her academic roots with this accessibly written study of that imperfect but ideal form of government.
The United States is strongly and customarily identified as the democratic power par excellence. However, urges Rice (No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington, 2011, etc.), now a professor in the business school at Stanford University, democracy is not an exclusively American province, nor is there compelling reason to believe that other nations cannot enjoy the freedoms it affords. Having witnessed at close hand the Arab Spring and the fall of the Soviet Union, the author examines several avenues leading to democratic formation, including the collapse of a totalitarian regime that leaves an “institutional vacuum,” one capable of being filled by democratic agencies that may be weak at first, as well as the development of a quasi-democracy that may evolve into a more truly democratic system. In the latter instance, she writes, meaningfully, “an executive with too much power, ruling by decree and circumventing other institutions, is a sure path to authoritarian relapse.” The remark is evidently directed to the likes of Vladimir Putin and other autocrats, but much of Rice’s conversational and sharp book can be read as a quiet rebuke of the current occupant of the White House, who is no friend to the small-d democratic establishment in which Rice long made her career. Generally speaking, the author seems optimistic about the eventual odds of the world following the “path to liberty.” Even so, she warns that there are many obstacles and impediments to democratic progress, with challenges such as inequality, “stalled social mobility,” and particularly a lack of educational opportunity for the poor, education being key to democratic development in the first place, as the Founders well knew. Along the way, Rice offers a conditional defense of externally imposed regime change in Iraq.
Some readers may not be convinced, but this book deserves a broad audience, especially in our current political climate.Pub Date: May 9, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5387-5997-4
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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