A minor but solid, very well-written contribution to the vast literature surrounding Teddy Roosevelt.
A storied family is broken apart by its patriarch’s devotion to war and the quest for honor.
As Burns (1920: The Year that Made the Decade Roar, 2015, etc.) recounts, Quentin Roosevelt, born in 1897, was both Theodore Roosevelt’s youngest son and the repository of a great deal of his hopes. Sickly like his father, though less inclined to make boastful declarations such as that he was “as strong as a bull moose,” Quentin emerged in boyhood as a fine young man with a distinct sense of noblesse oblige. In one sparkling moment in the book, he quietly reproaches a haughty society dame who asks how he can stand the “common boys” at his school: “My father says there are only four kinds of boys: good boys and bad boys and tall boys and short boys; that’s all the kinds of boys there are.” With less drive than his father, who champed to get into the fight against Spain in Cuba and blustered his way into a “big stick” foreign policy in the White House, Quentin joined the fledgling aviation corps under Eddie Rickenbacker and died in France—an event, Burns writes, for which his mother, Edith, had been preparing ever since her war-loving husband went off to battle and then instilled in his children, one by one, an obligation to go to war. That resolve ended in a spiritual gloom, “a shroud he would wear for the rest of his days.” Roosevelt’s story is of a piece with his friend Rudyard Kipling’s, whose life and work were overturned by the loss of his son in France in 1915. None of it will come as news to readers well versed in the life of Roosevelt—it figures, for instance, in Edmund Morris’ Colonel Roosevelt (2010)—but Burns finds special meaning and resonance in the father-son relationship, and his slender book makes for a fine homage.
A minor but solid, very well-written contribution to the vast literature surrounding Teddy Roosevelt.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-60598-951-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
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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