A memoir that reads like an epilogue to a life of accomplishment.
Notes at 90 from a former president at peace.
There is little in the way of score settling in the latest from Carter (A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence, and Power, 2014, etc.) and not much that is likely to ignite controversy the way that Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid (2006) did. With his long-standing marriage, the Carter Center, and a Nobel Peace Prize, along with more than two-dozen books that have “provided a much-needed source of income for my family,” the author has enjoyed one of the longest and richest lives since leaving the presidency. He has also established himself as a respected and activist public figure, and he still can’t figure out why the press treated him so negatively during his one term in Washington. “I had negative coverage in forty-six of the forty-eight months I served….This was a problem we could never understand or resolve but just decided to accommodate what we couldn’t correct,” he writes. The presidency and the campaign for re-election receive short shrift here, perhaps as Carter has written about them at length before. Instead, he writes, “some of the more personal and intimate events in my life are covered here for the first time,” including his military years, a career in which he might have remained (and which wife Rosalynn resented him for leaving) if the death of his father hadn’t returned him to the family farm. Carter pays only cursory attention to his political ascent as a perennial outsider who became state senator, governor, and, in the wake of Watergate, president. Only an offhand remark on a Gallup poll of 32 “names of potential Democratic nominees. Mine was not among them,” suggests the surprise and significance of his triumph. The drawings and poems by the author add even more of a personal touch, though crises in his marriage and his “estrangement” from the Obama presidency offer the most noteworthy revelations.
A memoir that reads like an epilogue to a life of accomplishment.Pub Date: July 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5011-1563-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
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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