A well-researched and -written history that will satisfy both Eisenhower and Nixon aficionados.
Novelist and former New Yorker and Washington Post editor Frank (Trudy Hopedale, 2007, etc.) delves into political biography, focusing on the complicated relationship between President Dwight Eisenhower and his two-term vice president, Richard Nixon.
Though both private men from similar backgrounds, Eisenhower and Nixon differed in many ways. When Eisenhower chose Nixon, then a senator from California, as his running mate in 1952, it seemed to be more the choice of his advisers and one of political expediency, as a way to satisfy the right wing of the Republican Party. As Frank demonstrates, the pair’s long relationship was marked by “a fluctuating, unspoken level of discomfort,” and they were never close (even after Eisenhower’s grandson and Nixon’s daughter married in 1968). Frank points out how the eager Nixon felt “like a junior officer” in the presence of the war-hero president, who disliked Nixon personally and rarely enthusiastically supported him. Indeed, the author portrays Nixon’s vice presidency as often frustrating and stressful. In one engaging section, Frank describes how Eisenhower seriously considered removing Nixon from the re-election ticket, but he expressed it to Nixon in an unclear and passive-aggressive fashion; meanwhile, the president’s health issues made a Nixon succession a real possibility on multiple occasions. Throughout, Frank highlights the major events of the Eisenhower presidency, the following presidential elections and beyond, filtering them effectively through the lens of the Eisenhower-Nixon dynamic. The author does a fine job delineating the complex personalities of both men, and he provides novelistic touches befitting his background. At one point, he describes the colorful political figure Clare Boothe Luce as “beautiful, charming, and slightly mad,” and, at another, he thoughtfully compares Nixon to an Anthony Trollope character.
A well-researched and -written history that will satisfy both Eisenhower and Nixon aficionados.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4165-8701-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2012
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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