Capably written and argued, though only the future will tell whether the elegy for the Republican establishment is premature.
A thoughtful political biography of two dynasts of a now-receding generation of politicians.
The title of historian/journalist Updegrove’s (Indomitable Will: LBJ in the Presidency, 2012, etc.) latest comes from George W. Bush’s well-documented lament that the rise of Donald Trump meant that he and his father would be the last “real” Republicans to hold the White House. That worry, suggests the author, is well-founded; by his account, the Bushes are definitively establishment figures who, while of much different styles, represented the virtues of prudence, civility, and bipartisanship as leaders of a party that has lately “placed ideological purity over pragmatism and compromise in governance.” George W. claims that his brother Jeb’s primary defeat at Trump’s hands was the result of anger stemming from “a moribund economy.” If the anger seems more free-floating and less directed than all that, it certainly would seem that disdain marked Jeb’s trouncing in an arena that by all rights he should have dominated. Updegrove discusses the advantages and disadvantages of being a member of a political dynasty in a time when voters seem mistrustful of them—and Trump, he observes, upended two of them, the Bushes and the Clintons—noting that still other Bushes are waiting in the wings for their turns. In the main, this is a solid examination of how the Bushes behaved while in office, the one patrician and the other homespun, the latter much more certain of the righteousness of his cause even after being told by his own mother that he would not prevail in his first run for public office. (“True story,” he shrugged, though Barb proved to be wrong.) In the end, George H.W. emerges as a bit warmer and less wooden than he might have seemed during his term as president, while George W. emerges as somewhat more substantial than he is often depicted as being.
Capably written and argued, though only the future will tell whether the elegy for the Republican establishment is premature.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-265412-0
Page Count: 484
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2017
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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