Thought-provoking from start to finish.
“No postwar politician did more to educate Americans to the primacy of image in politics” than Richard Nixon. So argues historian Greenberg in a rich work full of lessons and implications for spin doctors.
Richard Milhous Nixon lent himself to caricature throughout his long political career: famed for his five o’clock shadow at all hours of the day, for his sweaty brow, for his ski nose, he paid the mortgages for countless editorial cartoonists. This was not the legacy he sought, though Nixon was long aware of the need for a modern president to convey a memorable image at all times; in fact, Nixon reflected in one of his many memoirs, “In the modern presidency, concern for image must rank with concern for substance.” But Nixon, Greenberg argues, indeed authored that legacy and more: he gave us our current common-man image of the president, whether believable or not in his case, which did much for the rise of conservative populism; and in countless other ways he “nourished a culture in which the traffic in imagery was a constant and overriding concern.” Greenberg gets down to quite specific cases: he demonstrates, for instance, that Nixon carefully arranged for the famed May 1972 summit on strategic-arms limitations to be held in Moscow not to achieve greater public support for detente, but instead, as Charles Colson put it, “to strengthen the president’s image as one of the great world leaders of the century”; he constantly shifted political stances and alliances to keep what he imagined to be the most voter-friendly image before the public view, such that today no one can quite agree whether he was a conservative or a liberal; and in the final days, he even conspired to lock reporters in the White House press room so that he could have a moment away from the cameras he had always courted, “unmolested and unobserved.”
Thought-provoking from start to finish.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-393-04896-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2003
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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