Roosevelt’s iconic hundred days followed another hundred days, far more obscure but equally critical, and Rauchway’s...
A Depression-era history of an exceedingly difficult transition from one president to another.
Franklin Roosevelt crushed Herbert Hoover on Nov. 8, 1932, and assumed the presidency on March 4, 1933. Though scholars have not ignored those four months, the period was a spectacularly eventful one that deserves closer attention. Rauchway (History/Univ. of California, Davis; The Money Makers: How Roosevelt and Keynes Ended the Depression, Defeated Fascism, and Secured a Prosperous Peace, 2015, etc.) does just that in this lively, opinionated, and definitely not revisionist history. Historians are re-evaluating Hoover’s reputation as a dour technocrat who failed to address the Depression. Rauchway portrays him as an energetic and workaholic man convinced that direct government relief would destroy our freedom. He described Roosevelt as an unprincipled politico who intended to inflict a radical “New Deal” on America. The author agrees, emphasizing that Hoover’s prediction that Roosevelt was planning reforms was correct, but he points out that subsequent historians have generated the “myth of Roosevelt as an ignorant but blithe spirit simply trying expedients until he found some that worked.” Rauchway documents the new president’s consulting experts and legislators for ideas. Even before inauguration, supporters introduced several New Deal bills to the lame-duck Congress. Except for the repeal of Prohibition, all were defeated. The author paints a grim picture of a nation awash with misery and on the verge of revolution—a feeling shared by members of Hoover’s administration if not Hoover himself. Many experts complain that Roosevelt stubbornly refused to cooperate during the interregnum, but “cooperation,” according to Rauchway’s Hoover, meant foreswearing deficit spending, government regulations, relief, public works, and currency inflation (i.e. the New Deal), which, Hoover believed, would make matters worse.
Roosevelt’s iconic hundred days followed another hundred days, far more obscure but equally critical, and Rauchway’s insightful history brings it vividly to life.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-465-09458-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 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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