A man with Lincoln’s beliefs could never win a presidential election today, but as portrayed in these pages he could very...
Honest Abe was a white supremacist, a trade protectionist, a pro-industrialist—in short, a Henry Clay Whig whose greatest contribution to history was his insistence that the experiment in American freedom had relevance for the rest of the planet.
Neo-con Lind (Vietnam: The Necessary War, 1999, etc.), a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, administers a much overdue beating to the vast carpet of Lincoln studies. As he illustrates throughout this corrective work, the complex Lincoln of history has gradually been simplified into a 1960s liberal; the Boy Who Read by Candlelight, the Young Man Who Split Rails, the Great Emancipator, the Benevolent Big Brother in the Fraternity of Man. But the author demonstrates that Lincoln believed blacks were inferior to whites and that the races shouldn’t mix. He thought long and planned hard for the transportation of American blacks to colonies in Africa or Central America (or even Texas); he freed slaves only in the states that had seceded, and only after those states refused to rejoin the Union. Credit for emancipation, Lind writes, properly ought to go to the intransigent Southern leaders who forced Lincoln’s hand. The author reminds us that Lincoln wished mainly to preserve the Union and to adhere to the Founding Fathers’ principles (including deism: the 16th president had little use for traditional Christianity). Lind is most interesting and convincing in his long discussion of Lincoln’s place in the history of American’s emerging racial attitudes. Other sections are primarily cut-and-paste rehashes, not particularly well buttressed by numerous endnotes of the “as quoted in” variety. The text also slows down when the author discusses trade, tariffs, immigration and Reconstruction. And some readers may raise eyebrows at his implication that the current President Bush is a scion of Lincoln, at least as far as the extension of freedom is concerned.
A man with Lincoln’s beliefs could never win a presidential election today, but as portrayed in these pages he could very well get shot.Pub Date: May 17, 2005
ISBN: 0-385-50739-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2005
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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