Readers of McCullough will find little new factual information here, but the solid interpretation of events will interest...
A brief life of the post-revolutionary president who liked nothing better than to be left alone.
And isolation, comments Diggins (History/CUNY), “while healthy for poetry or philosophy, is fatal in the sphere of politics.” Laboring in the daunting shadow of David McCullough’s massive, literate biography (John Adams, 2001), Diggins (On Hallowed Ground, 2000, etc.) acquits himself well in the shorter format of the American President series. Like McCullough, he spends time considering Adams in the light of political alter ego Thomas Jefferson, who lived as an aristocrat while speaking as a radical yet unfairly accused his sober-minded, eminently democratic opponent of being a Caesar in the making. Indeed, writes Diggins, when he defeated Adams in the 1800 presidential race, Jefferson even claimed that “he saved America from aristocracy and monarchy”—little realizing, the author adds, “that his utter dependence on party politics represented a defeat of his own ideals.” Not that Adams’s own ideals were left intact in the hubbub of sectarian fighting and character assassination that marked the earliest days of the republic. As Diggins notes, Adams’s questionable record in office helps us “understand American history for what it really is: a study . . . of emerging interest-driven, factional blocs struggling for dominance within a political culture of consensus.” In this struggle, the author claims Adams as the prototypical American liberal, whose championing of a strong executive branch, judiciary, and federal military force allowed the central state to take root and grow. Without that state, Diggins argues, no progressive cause since could have been realized. “Ironically,” he observes on, “the egalitarian ideals Jefferson espoused would be realized in the very institutions he opposed.”
Readers of McCullough will find little new factual information here, but the solid interpretation of events will interest students of the presidency and the early republic.Pub Date: June 11, 2003
ISBN: 0-8050-6937-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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