A useful exposé of how things get done—and buried—in Washington.
Washington insider and accomplished journalist Drew (The Corruption of American Politics, 1999, etc.) provides a fly-on-the-wall portrait of the congressional maverick and his struggle to reform campaign-finance laws.
To judge by this account, Arizona senator John McCain—war hero, patrician, and thorn in the sitting president’s side—has a long memory for slights, favors, and betrayals, a memory fully engaged in the business of schmoozing, cajoling, and arm-twisting his way to a major overhaul of how dollars come into politicians’ hands. McCain, Drew reports, is an outspoken foe of pork-barrel spending, and as she follows him from room to room in the Capitol, she finds him battling such things as an Alabama senator’s request for $2 million to repair a Birmingham-area statue of the Greek god Vulcan and “a particularly egregious boondoggle by which the Air Force was to lease a hundred new Boeing jets—which it hadn’t requested—for ten years, paying ninety percent of their cost, and then give them back to Boeing with at least twenty more years of usefulness remaining.” At the top of McCain’s agenda throughout is a series of bills meant to curtail the corporate soft money that keeps congressmen in power, bills mostly opposed by his fellow Republicans. Drew ably captures McCain in action as he works the floor and offers vivid details on the formidable array of enemies he has attracted as he presses his cause, not least of them George Bush, who in the South Carolina primary mounted what one local politician described as “the dirtiest, nastiest campaign I’ve ever seen” while battling McCain for the Republican presidential nomination. Drew clearly approves of McCain, though never so much as to allow partisanship to get in the way of her usual careful reporting.
A useful exposé of how things get done—and buried—in Washington.Pub Date: May 13, 2002
ISBN: 0-7432-3002-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2002
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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