A memorable lesson in how journalists can dig out the truths beneath official lies.
A micro-history of a White House coverup, a journalist's reputation defiled and the eventual emergence of the truth.
NPR reporter Algeo (Harry Truman’s Excellent Adventure: The True Story of a Great American Road Trip, 2009, etc.) examines a slice of American history from 1893, when President Grover Cleveland disappeared from public view for about a week around the Independence Day holiday. With the nation suffering an economic depression, Cleveland and his advisors did not want to heighten the panic with the truth: The president had been diagnosed with cancer of the mouth. The president arranged for the tumor to be surgically removed by a team of physicians aboard the yacht of a friend. Cleveland's wife Frances and his press aide lied to journalists and anybody else who asked about what was occurring on the yacht. Journalists accepted the lies, and the general public believed Cleveland had undergone nothing more than uncomfortable dental work. The truth did not begin to emerge until late August, after accomplished journalist E.J. Edwards broke the story in a Philadelphia newspaper. Despite Edwards' longtime reputation as a fair and accurate reporter, other journalists, government officials and general readers believed he had concocted the account. Edwards would not receive total vindication until 1917, when one of the surgeons who assisted in the operation on the yacht published an account in the Saturday Evening Post. Algeo is a determined researcher and fine stylist, and the story of presidential illness serves as an effective connecting thread through a somewhat broader account of the United States during the hard economic times of the 1890s.
A memorable lesson in how journalists can dig out the truths beneath official lies.Pub Date: May 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-56976-350-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2011
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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