An absorbing political and legal biography of a complicated and important figure of the 19th century. Niven (American History/Claremont Graduate School; Martin Van Buren and the Romantic Age of Politics, 1983, etc.) accomplishes for Salmon P. Chase previously what he did for Martin Van Buren, rescuing him from historical obscurity. Chase, a prominent politician and jurist, is today best remembered as Lincoln's secretary of the treasury, a post from which he secured funding to wage the Civil War and oversaw the creation of a new national banking system. Born in New Hampshire in 1808, he was shuttled off to relatives when financial crisis struck his family after the death of his father. Yet he still managed to attend Dartmouth. After studying law in Washington, D.C., with Attorney General William Wirt, he moved to Cincinnati, where he quickly became a leader in the antislavery movement. He defended so many runaway slaves that he earned himself the epithet ``the attorney general of fugitive slaves.'' Serving in the Senate and as governor of Ohio, he joined the new Republican Party and sought its nomination for president in 1860, losing to Lincoln. Instead, he accepted the treasury post. In 1864, Lincoln named him chief justice of the Supreme Court, in which capacity he is best known for presiding at the impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson, Lincoln's successor. Though Johnson wanted to dismantle Reconstruction and was a staunch political opponent of all Chase stood for, the justice reigned over the proceedings with stony decorum, ensuring a fair trial that led to Johnson's acquittal. Niven limns a complex portrait of a man he describes as a tragic and ultimately unfulfilled figure. Chase spent his life in public service but was egotistical and intensely ambitious. He was a man of lofty principles who nonetheless compromised them at important moments. With its thorough research and fine writing, this volume surpasses the high standard Niven set for himself in his biography of Van Buren.
Pub Date: March 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-19-504653-6
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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