Overlong, as are so many of Brinkley’s books, but a brightly written, highly useful argument, especially in a time when the...
Brinkley (History/Rice Univ.; Cronkite, 2012, etc.) returns with the provocative argument that Theodore Roosevelt was not the only environmentalist in the Roosevelt clan—far from it.
“There was never a eureka moment that transformed Franklin D. Roosevelt into a dyed-in-the-wool forest conservationist,” writes the author at the opening of this book. If there were, perhaps it would be at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, when the 11-year-old boy studied the thousands of specimens of flora and fauna on display, ardently taking in “the nucleus of Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History.” Having grown up with an interest in nature, and especially in birds, FDR took time as an officeholder in New York to preserve state lands and create parks; among his campaigns was one to convert the entire Catskills Mountains region into a protected conservation district, if not a state park, that mixed private and public ownership. As governor of New York, he assembled his first “brain trusts,” and among the first of these was one devoted to forestry and agronomy. As president, he famously initiated such environmental programs as the Civilian Conservation Corps, using an earlier idea of “forestry as work-relief” to gain bipartisan support for other planks of the New Deal. In his biography of the secretary, T.H. Watkins gave Interior Secretary Harold Ickes most of the credit for the principal environmental accomplishments of the FDR administrations, but Brinkley makes clear that Roosevelt was there at the creation and took a personal interest and lobbied hard for his proposals. Not all of them succeeded, notes the author: of a proposed “national shoreline parks” measure, for instance, only one of a dozen sites, Cape Hatteras, came under national protection. Even so, dozens of grasslands, game refuges, forests, and other conservation units came into the commonweal thanks to FDR’s work.
Overlong, as are so many of Brinkley’s books, but a brightly written, highly useful argument, especially in a time when the public domain is under siege.Pub Date: March 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-208923-6
Page Count: 752
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2016
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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