A touch too long but a pleasingly encompassing view of the hapless papal reign that inspired Kertzer’s early book The...
A bulky but readable history of the last leader of the Papal States.
Pio Nono, or Pius IX, was one of the architects of the modern Catholic Church, the pontiff who forged the doctrine of papal infallibility while making some decidedly fallible choices on the front of worldly politics. According to Pulitzer Prize winner Kertzer (Social Science/Brown Univ.; The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe, 2014, etc.), the pope had reasonably humane inclinations but not much sense of the power politics of the day. He found himself in an uncomfortable alliance with France while facing off against the nationalist forces that, inspired by Garibaldi’s red shirts, would forge a unified country out of a collection of rival city-states and principalities. One legacy of Pius IX’s time is the tiny enclave of Vatican City, surrounded by an Italy that, nominally Catholic, does not suffer much political interference from it. That tradition reflects on the fraught relationship with Italy’s first king, Victor Emmanuel, who died early in his reign. As Kertzer writes, “the Catholic press made much of this evidence of divine punishment, although it might have made more of it had the elderly Pius IX not died four weeks later.” Though broadly criticized in his time, the pope, a hero of conservatives today, was elevated to sainthood during John Paul’s papacy. The cardinal who guided Pius IX in political matters has not fared so well, Kertzer notes; while attempting to preserve the pope’s 1,000-year-old kingdom, he enriched himself and his family while allegedly maintaining a series of mistresses. In the end, writes the author, the old papacy was a victim of the Enlightenment, which had further implications when the Second Vatican Council removed some of the last of its medieval vestiges.
A touch too long but a pleasingly encompassing view of the hapless papal reign that inspired Kertzer’s early book The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortaro (1997).Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8991-5
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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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