A wide-ranging biography of perennial also-ran Adlai Stevenson which demonstrates that character is destiny. Stevenson has been the subject of several recent books, but Baker (History/ Goucher Coll.; Mary Todd Lincoln, 1987) affords his life a depth, historical and personal, that few other writers have acknowledged. She traces Stevenson's family history at length to Scotland, then Ulster, the adopted home of many Presbyterian Scots who would later fuel America's expansion beyond the Appalachian Mountains. The Stevensons were actors in that expansion, moving from Pennsylvania across into Kentucky after Daniel Boone opened that territory, later settling in the fertile bottomlands of Illinois, where they would become farmers, solid citizens, and important politicians (Stevenson's grandfather was Grover Cleveland's second-term vice president). Baker suggests that with this pedigree Stevenson could have become nothing but a leader. Long portrayed as a misunderstood saint of American politics, Stevenson turns out in Baker's account to have had the full range of human frailties. He conducted simultaneous affairs with two women—a journalist and a State Department assistant secretary; both evidently believed that Stevenson would divorce his long-suffering wife to marry them. As governor of Illinois, he illegally paid bonuses to favorite political aides from a private fund. ``Blinkered by self-righteousness,'' Baker writes, ``Stevenson overlooked any possibility of influence peddling on him.'' For all that, he emerges as an unjustly abused fellow, smeared by his association with Alger Hiss, derided as an ``egghead'' by Dwight Eisenhower, and calumniated by such right-wing propagandists as Walter Winchell, who, believing Herbert Hoover's assertion that Stevenson was homosexual, proclaimed, ``A vote for Adlai Stevenson is a vote for [transsexual] Christine Jorgensen and a woman in the White House.'' Baker writes with sympathy and considerable vigor, and this fine biography takes a refreshingly long view of an important figure in recent political history.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-393-03874-2
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1995
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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