A worthy overview that acknowledges Wilson’s considerable strengths and his many limitations.
Latest in the American Presidents series, profiling a respected but now overlooked chief executive.
“Woodrow Wilson lived too long and then died too soon,” writes Brands (History/Texas A&M; The Strange Death of American Liberalism, 2001, etc.). Born before the Civil War, Wilson lived into the mid-1920s, long enough to see the emasculation of his pet project, the League of Nations. By this account, Wilson was an accidental politician, roped into running for New Jersey office after he lost a long battle as president of Princeton over where to locate the new graduate school. Elected by a commanding margin after wowing listeners with his fine oratory, Wilson earned good marks as governor, though his handlers weren’t pleased when he demolished former patron Boss Smith’s political machine. He was recruited to run as a Democratic candidate for president in the 1912 election, the first, Brands writes, “in which party primaries played an important role.” Lifting a page from Theodore Roosevelt, Wilson pledged not just to rein in the trusts but to destroy them, a sentiment that played well to Progressive audiences. But Brands suggests that Wilson was not particularly popular once in office, especially after he went back on his pledge to keep America neutral in WWI. Neither was he an effective lawmaker, perhaps because he was severely depressed following his wife’s death in 1914. When Wilson suffered a massive stroke in 1919, second wife Edith and confidantes in the White House “conspired to shield the public from full knowledge of the president’s disability.” Brands argues that Wilson might have been better served had he died as a result of that stroke, “a martyr to the cause of world peace,” rather than living to see that cause jeopardized by the Versailles Treaty and the economic ruin it wreaked on Germany, opened the way for WWII.
A worthy overview that acknowledges Wilson’s considerable strengths and his many limitations.Pub Date: June 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-8050-6955-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2003
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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