A well-crafted book full of pointed lessons in how not to run a country—and sure to rouse suspicions of sedition in certain...
Give a demagogue a pliant press and colleagues fearful of losing power if they protest his excesses, and you have McCarthyism—or perhaps the current Congress.
It only seems, writes Johnson (The Best of Times, 2001, etc.), that America “entered an unprecedented era of stress and danger—an Age of Anxiety unlike anything experienced before” after the 9/11 attacks. But the early Cold War years were more dislocating: Fear was everywhere in the air, and all a power-hungry politico like Joseph McCarthy, literally schooled in Mein Kampf, had to do was find the right nerve to probe. He found it in the widespread fear that Commies lurked under every bed and in every closet, and for a couple of years he ran the nation. “In retrospect,” writes Johnson in this incisive portrait, “it’s incredible to recall the depths to which McCarthyism descended and the damage it wrought.” But, Johnson adds, McCarthy would not have succeeded had he not been backed by “an ever-expanding network of anticommunists,” including conservative media commentators, think-tankers and clerics, to say nothing of employers and advertisers who withdrew support from those whom McCarthy denounced. The parallels are evident; what is absent from the modern stage, Johnson suggests, is a strong moderate Republican wing of the kind that eventually turned against the red-baiters and restored order. Johnson might have forged the linkage of the McCarthy era to the current days of Gitmo and the Patriot Act more strongly, and the genesis-of-fear thesis could have used some grounding in the terrible Reagan-era days of Ground Zero, but overall his point holds: The current political climate is much more reactionary, he writes, than that of McCarthy’s time, and it wouldn’t take much to break a democracy that in so many ways already appears broken.
A well-crafted book full of pointed lessons in how not to run a country—and sure to rouse suspicions of sedition in certain quarters.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-15-101062-5
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
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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