A perfect introduction to a deeply private and immensely important man.
An attorney and author looks at the early life and career of our fourth president.
Though he’s the principal architect of our constitutional form of government, James Madison (1751-1836) remains, for most Americans, the least distinct of all the Founders, better known as Hamilton’s and Jay’s co-author, as Jefferson’s lieutenant, as the beguiling Dolley’s husband. In this highly readable and often insightful treatment, Signer (Demagogue: The Fight to Save America from Its Worst Enemies, 2009, etc.) colors in the portrait, finding the essential Madison in the young man as he charts the diminutive Virginian’s “evolving character and his emerging ideas.” A remarkably intense, indefatigably hardworking youth, Madison mastered self-control in part to mask his raw sensitivity and frail health. Signer convincingly diagnoses his infirmity—contra Madison biographer Lynne Cheney—as “severe anxiety-driven panic attacks that made him ill.” Despite this weakness, he consciously set out to become a statesman, regularly asserting himself in the public, rough-and-tumble world of politics, using, oftentimes anonymously, the power of his ideas and the elegance of his pen to shape the debate. With a character influenced by his father, his tutor, and especially his college president, the Presbyterian cleric John Witherspoon, Madison drew ideas from his voluminous reading and all-encompassing scholarship. Finding the Socratic method distasteful and inadequate, he fashioned his own search for truth and developed it into a singular political strategy. Signer describes Madison’s method as an “interlocking set of nine tactics” that primarily emphasized ideas, preparation, timing, and, most of all, the quelling of passion in oneself and one’s opponent. The author offers some dramatic set pieces demonstrating Madison’s method in action—the 1784 fight against religious assessments in Virginia, the Constitutional Convention, the Virginia ratification battle, etc.—illustrating its effectiveness against more conventional tactics and politicians. He’s particularly good at showing how Madison’s discipline, relentless logic and faith in reason allowed him to triumph over his in-state antagonist, Patrick Henry.
A perfect introduction to a deeply private and immensely important man.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-61039-295-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Jan. 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2015
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
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