Overlong, but still the best life of Hay that we have and a persuasive argument for taking another look at the life of a...
An overstuffed biography of an overlooked American statesman and reluctant politician.
If you’re a political scientist, American historian or fan of 19th-century Republicanism, you have likely heard of John Hay (1838–1905). If you’re a tourist in Washington, you likely have passed by the Hay-Adams Hotel, across the street from St. John’s Church, where presidents go to pray. Former Newsweek editor Taliaferro (In a Far Country: The True Story of a Mission, a Marriage, and the Remarkable Reindeer Rescue of 1898, 2006, etc.) finds in Hay a subject worthy of wider circulation. Hay, from the minor aristocracy of small-town Illinois, began his professional career as a secretary to Abraham Lincoln, close enough to the action that he traveled with the president to Gettysburg and there recorded that Lincoln “said his half dozen lines of consecration and the music wailed and we went home.” By association with his friend Robert Lincoln, the president’s son, Hay came to be one of the fallen leader’s first biographers—but also a servant of Republican presidents thereafter, one who long “had sworn that he never would run for office, but even in his adamance, he gave hints that he was wavering.” Hay’s apogee came with service as secretary of state to Theodore Roosevelt, who signed up Hay for a second term without even consulting him—but he served till the end of his life, saying, “it would be a scandal to contradict him.” Taliaferro inclines toward too much completeness. The story of how the Panama Canal came to be is an intriguing one and worthy of a book itself, though here, its political complexities tend to burden an otherwise quickly flowing narrative, which moves even faster when friends of Hay, such as Mark Twain and Henry Adams, are part of it.
Overlong, but still the best life of Hay that we have and a persuasive argument for taking another look at the life of a career public servant.Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-1416597308
Page Count: 672
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
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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