Based on more than 300 interviews and 100,000 pages of previously classified documents, this enormous, blistering exposÇ seems hellbent on proving that the legendary FBI director had not feet of clay, but cloven hoofs. Gentry, coauthor of Helter-Skelter, depicts a bureaucrat par excellence who over 48 years maintained an empire through secret files that one anonymous politician called ``political cancer.'' Hoover's carefully burnished reputation as the incorruptible defender of the American way of life was largely a fraud, Gentry argues. Much of this book provides additional material on how Hoover sought to undermine his long list of enemies, which included Eleanor Roosevelt, Harry Truman, the Kennedys, Emma Goldman, Martin Luther King, Jr., and his most enduring nemesis, OSS head ``Wild Bill'' Donovan (whom Hoover foiled in his ambitions to become attorney-general and CIA director). More important, many revelations here will further tarnish Hoover's reputation, including how the director suppressed information unfavorable to the Bureau during the Warren Commission's investigation of JFK's murder; how he destroyed congressmen and even Supreme Court Associate Justice Abe Fortas; and how he became a ``petty thief'' by misappropriating government funds and concealing royalties from bestselling books, movies, and the TV-series The FBI. Unfortunately, unlike Richard Gid Powers's more balanced and subtle Secrecy and Power (1987), Gentry scarcely acknowledges Hoover's organizational genius or the middle-class milieu that was the source of his political and moral conservatism. A revealing and grimly fascinating political horror tale- -which, however, too frequently caricatures Hoover as a sinister Çminence grise rather than as a 20th-century power broker shaped (or misshaped) by his late-Victorian upbringing. (Seventy-one b&w photographs.)
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1991
ISBN: 0-393-02404-0
Page Count: 864
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1991
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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