A great president, then, if with a few blemishes. Good reading for students of the office and the time.
George Washington: a so-so general, at least at the start; a capable politician, even if he didn’t particularly enjoy pressing the flesh.
But a great president? This slender volume in Arthur Schlesinger’s American Presidents series, by political historian Burns (Dead Center, 1999, etc.) and revolutionary-era historian Dunn (Sister Revolutions, 1999), hints that some of Washington’s renown in that department has to do only with his being the first in the job. Yet, they add, Washington did much in office to recast the role of the chief executive as the energetic center of government, to the discomfort of contemporaries who believed that therein lay the road to kingship; his model posited “vigorous executive leadership, a flexible and resourceful administration, presidential rather than party leadership—a model that overrode the checks and balances without blatantly violating the spirit of the Constitution but that threatened to pulverize the opposition.” Other presidents have followed Washington’s lead to a fault, raising “formidable threats of excessive presidential power, as in the cases of a Lyndon B. Johnson and a George W. Bush,” but his legacy has largely been modified by the evolution of a two-party system that requires a little more teamwork on the president’s part. Burns and Dunn capably chart the course of Washington’s presidency, examining what they consider to be his successes (including the reshaping of the constitutional balance of powers) and failures (among them the polarization wrought by the Jay Treaty, which “left much that was precious to Washington—national unity, the common good, his own reputation—in tatters”). In the end, they fault him only gently for occasional missteps in office, notably his failure to act to hasten the end of slavery.
A great president, then, if with a few blemishes. Good reading for students of the office and the time.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2004
ISBN: 0-8050-6936-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2003
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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