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EISENHOWER

Name: EISENHOWER
Author: Jim Newton
ISBN: 978-0-385-52353-0

THE WHITE HOUSE YEARS

by Jim Newton ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 13, 2011

A national hero, Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969) could have run for president for either party but was temperamentally...

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Admiring biography of the 34th president.

A national hero, Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969) could have run for president for either party but was temperamentally inclined to the Republicans. After a landslide victory, he chose a strong cabinet with a variety of opinions, from the fierce Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, to Attorney General Herbert Brownell, who supported the nascent civil-rights movement. Los Angeles Times editor at large Newton (Justice for All: Earl Warren and the Nation He Made, 2006) points out that every incoming president believes that the nation is in crisis, and few doubted this in 1953. The Korean War was entering its third year of bloody stalemate; communism seemed on the march abroad with McCarthy’s anticommunist hysteria spreading confusion at home. Within a year, the war had ended, McCarthy had self-destructed and Eisenhower—not Dulles, insists Newton—was conducting the Cold War with good sense. The author explains his lackluster performance on civil rights on the weak grounds that he was a man of his times with many segregationist friends and little sympathy for blacks. Yet, by the standards of today’s Republicans, Eisenhower was a liberal who accepted New Deal social programs, showed no interest in massive tax cuts and opposed America’s enemies while refusing to support a military buildup. Although contemporary observers described him as an amiable, inarticulate figurehead, his reputation has risen since.

Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011

ISBN: 978-0-385-52353-0

Page Count: 468

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: June 28, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2011

Categories:

- BOOK REVIEW
MAN OF TOMORROW
by Jim Newton

- BOOK REVIEW
WORTHY FIGHTS
by Leon Panetta with Jim Newton

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

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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.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.