What does the Bush Restoration mean for the rest of us? Stay tuned, but consult Phillips for some disturbing scenarios that...
A corrupt dynasty founded on conquest, lies, and the certainty that ruler equals divine agent. Ancient China? Imperial Rome?
No, argues onetime Republican Party operative and latter-day liberal firebrand Phillips (William McKinley, p. 849, etc.): it’s now installed in Washington, by way of Connecticut and Texas. The power of the Bush dynasty, writes Phillips, extends for four generations, and its scions have been intimately involved in three of the 20th century’s chief growth industries: intelligence, energy, and national security. “If there are other families who have more fully epitomized and risen alongside the hundred-year emergence of the US military-industrial complex, the post-1945 national security state, and the 21st-century imperium,” he writes, “no one has identified them.” Fudging the truth, whether over the release of Iranian hostages or the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, is an essential skill in such an enterprise, Phillips argues, and the Bushes (and their Walker kin) are masters of deception. Clandestine skills, money laundering, and perhaps even election fixing also figure heavily on the family résumé, as do other talents essential to covert action but useless in nation building and humane governance. The latest Bush, the author suggests, is the most unsettling of the lot: bound up in the family’s trademark concerns, he also brings to the table a fundamentalist, millenarian view of history and a strong belief that his present station in life is divinely ordained. It is no small irony to discover that the majority of Muslims in the US voted for Dubya. It is also exceptionally meaningful that Bush’s mainstream core is made up of Bible-thumpers; Phillips characterizes the Bush coalition as “a narrowly Armageddon-believing electorate”—of no small significance to an administration bent on continued warfare in the Middle East (save Saudi Arabia, where its interests lie) in the name of good vs. evil.
What does the Bush Restoration mean for the rest of us? Stay tuned, but consult Phillips for some disturbing scenarios that bode ill for the future of good old-fashioned democracy.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2004
ISBN: 0-670-03264-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2003
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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