A welcome glimpse into the little-known time between the Civil War and the Gilded Age.
A behind-the-curtains glimpse at an often overlooked presidency, and at the cabals and conspiracies that brought it to an end.
John Garfield was something of an accidental president, a dark horse brought onto the national scene in the wake of the many scandals that rocked the administration of Ulysses S. Grant. Washington insider Ackerman, who has held various civil-service posts over the last three decades, has an evident appreciation for the Ohio Republican, who wasn’t exactly unwilling to see his hat tossed into the ring but hadn’t exactly gone out of his way to court high office, either. Garfield would have done better to stay on the farm, to judge by Ackerman’s engaging account of events, for Garfield found himself caught in the middle of a longtime feud between party bosses Roscoe Conkling and James G. Blaine, who hated each other with a fine passion and had been fighting for control of the Capitol for years. Garfield developed a platform of compromise that might surprise a few GOP loyalists today—including a staunch repudiation of “the pernicious doctrine of State supremacy”; support for federal funding for universal, secular education; and opposition to free trade and “doubtful financial experiments” such as federal intervention in the market. Still, for all his efforts at reconciliation, when Garfield was finally elected—and much of Ackerman’s account deals with his tortuous path to the White House—he had to maneuver his way between Conkling and Blaine, pleasing neither with his choice of lieutenants and initiatives. Enter Charles Guiteau, the assassin who gunned Garfield down in 1881; though often described as a disappointed office-seeker and lunatic, he pulled the trigger as a committed “stalwart” who wanted to see Garfield out of office and Garfield’s vice president Chester Arthur in—as did Conkling, who allegedly endorsed the murder. Did Guiteau act alone? Ackerman has some ideas about that, and about the condition of national politics 12 decades ago.
A welcome glimpse into the little-known time between the Civil War and the Gilded Age.Pub Date: July 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7867-1151-5
Page Count: 560
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2003
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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