bookshelf

THE PRESIDENTIAL RECORDINGS

Name: THE PRESIDENTIAL RECORDINGS
Author: David Coleman
ISBN: 978-0-393-08124-4

JOHN F. KENNEDY VOLUMES IV-VI: THE WINDS OF CHANGE: OCTOBER 29, 1962-FEBRUARY 7, 1963

edited by David Coleman & Timothy Naftali & Philip Zelikow ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 8, 2016

Fascinating to dip into casually and essential to students of the Kennedy administration, the Cold War, and...

bookshelf

Three months, 1,700 pages. But what months they were: a season in the midterm administration of John F. Kennedy marked by faltering polls, the aftermath of near nuclear war, and one crisis after another.

Yes, JFK secretly taped conversations in the White House, just like Nixon—and Johnson, Eisenhower, Truman, and Roosevelt. Nixon’s problem was refusing to acknowledge that his tapes existed. Kennedy, write the editors of this exhaustive set of transcripts, most probably taped in order to preserve moments for his post–White House memoir, and they “find no evidence that he taped only self-flattering moments.” Indeed, the tapes find the president wondering whether he’d been responsible for the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, the immediate results of which occupy him and his advisers in the first 1,000 pages of this collection, housed at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center. The present set of volumes opens the day after the crisis, “the world’s closest brush with global thermonuclear war,” ended; it closes with Kennedy still preoccupied with the cat and mouse of dealing with Fidel Castro and Nikita Khrushchev even as other leaders—from France’s Charles de Gaulle to emboldened Congressional Republicans at home—jockeyed to take advantage of changes in global realpolitik. One of those changes was a perceptible rise in American military readiness: as the editors note, on Nov. 4, the Strategic Air Command reached the peak of its force, such that “if the President ordered retaliatory strikes against the Soviet Union on this day, 1,749 nuclear bombers and 182 ballistic nuclear missiles were ready.” Even so, the collection sees Kennedy and aides such as Dean Rusk and Robert McNamara resisting the military’s demands for more funding and new weapons. For instance, said Kennedy to his chief military adviser of a submarine-mounted missile, “I don’t see quite why we’re building as many as we’re building.”

Fascinating to dip into casually and essential to students of the Kennedy administration, the Cold War, and late-20th-century world history.

Pub Date: Feb. 8, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-393-08124-4

Page Count: 1728

Publisher: Norton

Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2015

Categories:

bookshelf

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

bookshelf

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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

bookshelf

NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

bookshelf

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.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.