Ronald Reagan's rise from lifeguard and sportscaster to movie star, governor and president, seen through the eyes of a fan.
Morrell (Shackleton’s Way, 2001) presents the former president as the man of many mentors, maker of countless speeches and endlessly cultivated contacts, with boundless positivism as he worked his way up from Midwestern obscurity. The author, briefly a staffer, is clearly still in Reagan's thrall and cannot write a disparaging word about the man. At worst, he had a bad day, as in the first presidential debate with Walter Mondale. At his best, he learned to perfectly elucidate what was in the hearts and minds of his broad base of supporters, always with an eye on the crowd to see what played. Morrell is most at home describing her subject's formative years, and his eventual branding of himself as the affable and ever-positive leader with steely American convictions. The presidential years fly by in a maze of Swiss-cheese history, with whole epochs ignored or barely mentioned. The most historically enduring Reagan utterance, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall," pops up with little context. Always the Gipper abided, and then with a smart salute exited the public stage from its pinnacle. Each chapter ends, somewhat jarringly, with a self-questionnaire to help readers emulate the Reagan method. This may provide difficult for those who lack his charisma and oratorical perfect pitch. Fodder for ardent admirers of the former president; otherwise, slim pickings.
Pub Date: May 3, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4516-2085-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Threshold Editions/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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