For the general reader, a fair introduction to two towering personalities and to the 20th-century landscape before it turned...
How Britain’s playboy king and America’s cowboy president forged the modern Anglo-American partnership.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the great powers of Europe scrambled to form new alliances to advance their imperial ambitions. France and Britain formed the Entente Cordiale, “a loose arrangement…settling a wide range of controversies that had plagued relations between them for years.” A genuine player in world affairs for the first time, the United States abandoned its antagonism to the British Empire and embraced an alliance among the English-speaking peoples. Fromkin (International Relations, History, Law/Boston Univ.; Europe’s Last Summer: Who Started the Great War in 1914?, 2004, etc.) acknowledges that this rearrangement of the world’s diplomatic furniture was an almost predictable response to the threat posed by Germany’s unstable Kaiser Wilhelm to the traditional European balance of power. Further, the author concedes that neither Theodore Roosevelt nor Edward VII were entirely in control of their nations’ foreign policies and that, in any event, forces much larger than individual personalities shaped events. Still, yoking the two men as “secret partners” gives Fromkin sufficient excuse to throw bouquets at two successful, in many ways unlikely, leaders about whom many of their countrymen remained deeply skeptical. Through his mother Queen Victoria, “Bertie” was literally the uncle of all Europe, known primarily for his love of pleasure, France, fashion and women. Famously a cowboy and Rough Rider, the bellicose Roosevelt became, following McKinley’s assassination, America’s youngest president. Fromkin’s profiles explain the origins of each man’s public image, but also demonstrate that Roosevelt was more than “a mannerless savage,” Edward more than “a mindless playboy,” caricatures dear to their contemporaries perhaps, but long since dismissed by historians. How the global aspirations of each happily intersected at the 1906 Algeciras Conference serves as the narrative climax, but too much is merely asserted for the thesis to be entirely persuasive.
For the general reader, a fair introduction to two towering personalities and to the 20th-century landscape before it turned toxic.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59420-187-5
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
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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