informed by an entertaining historian. (Book-of-the-Month Club/History Book Club selection)
Fleet narrative and clear-eyed psychology put our 28th president’s flawed administration (1913–21) into personal and global
perspective. A veteran man of letters, Auchincloss (Collected Stories, 1994, etc.) discriminates between two Woodrow Wilsons (1856–1924): the cherished father, husband, and friend is trumped by the Presbyterian scion flexing a divine mandate to implement the people’s will according to his own. Wives Ellen Axson (died 1914) and Edith Galt (married 1915) kept Wilson’s favor by making adulation of him their life’s work, whereas faithful secretary Joseph Tumulty and “second personality” Edward House fell from grace, Auchincloss contends, as a consequence of Wilson’s conviction that disagreement equaled personal hostility. Perhaps such an attitude should not be too surprising in a man who once declared, “Remember that God ordained that I should be the next president.” Auchincloss analyzes brave accomplishments: quashing boss rule, “New Freedom” from monopolies, establishing child-labor laws, erecting the Federal Reserve system, and, alas, establishing an income tax. But again and again Wilson’s all-or-nothing dualism rendered compromise impossible—until compromise became unavoidable and he had to capitulate wholesale. Auchincloss is a fair-minded critic, but even he sees Wilson misjudging the Great War’s threat: campaigning for a second term in1916, Wilson proclaimed America “too proud to fight” in a “mechanical slaughter”—but by 1917 he had to declare war regardless. Auchincloss also deplores Wilson’s insistence on attaching his utopian League of Nations scheme to a punitive Treaty of Versailles that he must have known no Republican Congress would ratify. Indeed, the national tour to win public backing for the treaty induced the stroke that clipped Wilson’s career. One still blinks at the bizarre aftermath dramatized here: only a cursory inquiry was made by Congress into the sick man’s fitness to govern, and for months Wilson’s wife was his sole link to all government emissaries. No wonder his last word was “Edith.” Its keen characters shrewdly quoted, this taut, fair presentation leaves the reader entertained by an informed storyteller, and
informed by an entertaining historian. (Book-of-the-Month Club/History Book Club selection)Pub Date: April 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-670-88904-0
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2000
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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