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LINCOLN IN THE WORLD

Name: LINCOLN IN THE WORLD
Author: Kevin Peraino
ISBN: 978-0-307-88720-7

THE MAKING OF A STATESMAN AND THE DAWN OF AMERICAN POWER

by Kevin Peraino ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2013

Though well-researched and engagingly presented, Peraino’s materials include too little new information about Lincoln to add...

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In his workmanlike debut, veteran journalist Peraino examines Abraham Lincoln’s role in American foreign policy, “one of the few sparsely stocked corners of an otherwise massive library.”

As is well-known, Lincoln was occupied with pressing domestic matters for his entire administration and largely left the conduct of foreign policy to Secretary of State William Seward. As president, Lincoln had only two overriding foreign policy goals: to keep the nation out of wars with foreign powers and to keep other nations from recognizing the Confederacy. Even the first of these was difficult, as there was a widely held notion that a foreign war might help resolve the Civil War, and public opinion was inflamed by several international crises during this period. These included a clash with Great Britain over the Trent Affair and the French invasion of Mexico in support of the puppet emperor Maximilian. Peraino treats both at length, crediting Lincoln with encouraging journalists to prepare the public for a necessary but embarrassing climb-down over Trent. Discouraging foreign intervention in our own war, particularly by Britain, where thousands of textile workers were idled by a cotton shortage, required further subtle skill. The author argues that it was accomplished in large part by Lincoln’s gradual transition to emancipation as a war goal, which had a greater moral appeal to the European public than preserving a union that tolerated slavery. This was an approach advanced by, among others, Karl Marx, London correspondent for Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune. Finally, however, it detracts nothing from Lincoln’s glory to observe that the author’s view of him as “one of America’s seminal foreign-policy presidents” is something of a stretch. Peraino never fully brings into focus the contours of a distinctly Lincolnian foreign policy.

Though well-researched and engagingly presented, Peraino’s materials include too little new information about Lincoln to add much to readers’ understanding of the 16th president.

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2013

ISBN: 978-0-307-88720-7

Page Count: 416

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2013

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2013

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

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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.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.