A worthy addition to the growing list of memoirs from world-class servants of the public.
An autobiography from one of the world's leading political figures provides a special insight into ongoing civil and human rights questions.
Oxfam International honorary president Robinson explores the events that shaped her qualifications for the role she played on the global stage. An early advocate of church/state separation and a career of legal advocacy led her first to the Irish Senate, then to the country's presidency, then to a position as the U.N.'s high commissioner for human rights. Educated in Paris during the Algerian War, Robinson writes about how her views of human rights were shaped philosophically and legally: “I went back to reading about Gandhi…I read more of Martin Luther King.” This foundation stayed with her as she qualified for law degrees on both sides of the Atlantic and began to work in areas where conflict between personal morality and criminal codes became a source of unjust individual suffering. Ireland's European treaty commitments on human rights provided a lever to secure advances within her own country, which both benefited the cause of individual Irish men and women as well as people throughout Europe. Robinson describes winning Josie Airey the right to separate from an abusive husband “as the type of case [she] loved.” Successful political advocacy helped her become Ireland's first female president, and Robinson recounts how she transformed the office. Later controversies arising during the Iraq War have not undermined her international stature. She bases her view of human rights on FDR's “Four Freedoms, and she emphasizes the importance of the universal right to “decent work.”
A worthy addition to the growing list of memoirs from world-class servants of the public.Pub Date: March 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8027-7964-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2012
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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