A readable, endlessly interesting look at the LBJ years.
Hey, hey, LBJ: The former president, not much talked about these days, comes in for assessment by political colleagues and journalists of the day.
Celebrated playwright Clare Boothe Luce once remarked that all presidents are known by a single sentence: Thus, Lincoln freed the slaves; Washington was the father of his country; Clinton—well, you get the idea. For Lyndon Johnson, as LBJ Presidential Library Museum director Updegrove (Baptism by Fire: Eight Presidents Who Took Office in Times of Crisis, 2009, etc.) writes, the sentence would necessarily involve Vietnam, an assessment that is not strictly fair, since Johnson inherited the war. However, as he put it, “I knew from the start that if I left the woman I love—the Great Society—in order to fight that bitch of a war, then I would lose everything.” So he did, and in doing so he effectively repudiated his own record by not running for reelection in 1968. One bit of news in this newsworthy book is that Johnson plainly believed that he would have defeated Richard Nixon had he stood for office: “I believe I would have been nominated by that convention,” he said near the end of his life, “and that I would have won over Nixon by a substantial margin.” Instead, as Updegrove notes, the Democrats chose the bland Hubert Humphrey, who must have seemed a walk in the park after years of the mercurial Johnson, who was a blusterer and bully. However, notes staffer Myer Feldman, “I think Lyndon Johnson had great virtues and great vices, [and] depending on whether that particular day he was emphasizing the vices or the virtues, you liked or disliked him.” Other news: Johnson didn’t read books; by Dean Rusk’s account, Johnson was closely involved in resolving the Cuban Missile Crisis, though Bobby Kennedy later froze him out of the historical record; and Barry Goldwater missed an opportunity by pretending the civil-rights movement didn’t exist in the 1964 campaign.
A readable, endlessly interesting look at the LBJ years.Pub Date: March 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-307-88771-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2012
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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