The peerless travel writer laughs, snarls, glares in contempt, and sheds real tears in a critical but ultimately sentimental biographical essay on the martyred president. After comparing the American adoration of Abraham Lincoln to the sealed plastic, single-portion tubs of grape jelly she took with her toast in roadside coffee shops some 40 years ago on her first visit to the States, Morris (Fifty Years of Europe, 1997, etc.) seems out for blood, or at least better breakfast fare. She finds neither as she visits log cabins of dubious authenticity, Civil War battlefields, public parks, and 19th-century houses spared the wrecking ball because Honest Abe lived and (in a small room across from Ford’s Theater) died in them. Eschewing both Carl Sandburg’s six-volume hagiography and more recent Lincoln scholarship, Morris—quoting mostly from the biased memoirs of Lincoln’s law partner William Herndon and Lincoln’s own letters, poetry, and speeches—discovers what any American high schooler might have told her: that the humble rail-splitter was an astute politician whose law practice represented the railroads— interests, and that the Great Emancipator was initially ambivalent about freeing slaves, possibly because his wife, Mary Todd, came from a slave-owning family. Morris finds it ironic that Lincoln worshipers, from bearded look-alikes at souvenir shops to fat tourists struggling up the marble stairs leading to his Kentucky log- cabin birthplace, ignore the man she’s sure he is: a melancholic, unsophisticated, animal-loving family man whose simple departure speech, which Morris reads at the Springfield railway station where Lincoln left to take up residence at the White House, moves her to tears. “He was essentially a nice man,” she sighs. By the time she visits somber Gettysburg, she is gushing with admiration for a rough-hewn, unrefined, but exquisitely gentle commoner who rose to meet the challenge of his times, and help promote the meddlesome idealism of millennial America. Caustic, patronizing, and misinformed: Lincoln for Dummies.(First serial rights to Preservation)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-684-85515-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1999
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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