Barbed, to be sure, but less grouchy than exasperated and a pleasure for like-minded readers.
The curmudgeonly actor, best known for his zeitgeist-riding portrayal of journalist Lou Grant, weighs in on the Constitution and its discontents in a smart, often entertaining polemic.
It’s a common conservative trope that progressives are on a mission to undo the intent of the Founding Fathers and destroy the compact under which the nation operates. Not so, writes Asner. Progressives, he suggests, are working more closely in spirit with the Constitution on numerous issues, such as its linkage of the right to own guns to service in a well-regulated militia. “Nothing in the Constitution suggests, let alone enforces, the concepts of limited government, limited taxes, and limited regulations,” argues the author, just as very little in the private lives of the founders inspires admiration: more than half of the framers of the Constitution were slaveholders, many were involved in shady land speculation, some later committed treason, and many used public office to line their purses. (As Asner notes, George Washington’s presidential salary of $25,000 a year is the equivalent of $1.5 million today. He adds, “he probably needed the money,” since he was, like so many of those framers, wracked with debt.) The true enemies of the Constitution, Asner holds, are the tea party and Christian right and gun lobby and so forth, about which he impatiently writes, “why don’t they just write our country a new Bill of Rights and be done with it?”—declaring Christianity to be the official religion of the land, kicking down the doors to ferret out gays and abortion clinics, and so on. The opportunities for hyperbole and rant are many, but Asner retains a mostly even tone, closing with a timely line from Thomas Jefferson: “The care of human life and happiness and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government.”
Barbed, to be sure, but less grouchy than exasperated and a pleasure for like-minded readers.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6602-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2017
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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