Not problem-free, but worthy, ambitious, and of much interest to students of recent US history.
A sprawling, unwieldy, yet readable life of the fallen president.
O’Brien (History Emeritus/Univ. of Wisconsin) professes to have spent more than ten years on this book, and there’s no reason to doubt him: he cites just about every study and incidental work in the literature, and his own massive contribution sometimes slows to a real-time crawl as he describes key events in Kennedy’s presidency. Indeed, the author tends to give perhaps too much consideration to gainsaying theories, such as the politically edged charge that JFK was no hero as the commander of PT-109. O’Brien tosses that charge about for a few pages before noting what he might have more simply written: the men aboard the doomed swift boat considered their skipper to be a hero, so what more do we need? But plenty of people had it in for Kennedy all his life, the author hints. Early on, for instance, the FBI seems to have taken considerable interest in his love life, believing that a Danish bedfellow of his was a Nazi spy; an official dossier was just one price JFK had to pay for his lifelong philandering. Yet O’Brien seems reluctant to do more than mention matters that have exercised other writers, such as the illegal origins of the Kennedy family fortune and its patriarch’s links to organized crime, not to mention his antediluvian political ideas. (O’Brien does write, however, that Joseph Kennedy got into much hot water at the beginning of WWII for remarking that “Democracy is finished in England. It may be here.”) The best portions chronicle JFK’s abbreviated presidency, showing how he allowed himself to be manipulated on the matter of Vietnam while gaining more solid knowledge of Cuba and the Soviet Union, and how the president, a sharp student of economics, tried to work magic with tax cuts that flew in the face of a wartime deficit, a condition that will seem familiar to readers today.
Not problem-free, but worthy, ambitious, and of much interest to students of recent US history.Pub Date: March 15, 2005
ISBN: 0-312-28129-3
Page Count: 1064
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
