A readable exercise in civics, and surely more inclusive than, say, William Bennett’s or Lynne Cheney’s published views on...
Does America have a set of shared values? Perhaps not, writes pop historian Baldwin, in a time when “the pulse of the nation often sounds as if it is emanating from two separate heartbeats.”
Hearts in red state and blue will probably be quickened by at least a couple of the ten tropes that Baldwin identifies as shared, galvanizing, unifying beliefs—but which of them? Emersonian self-reliance? The dissenters’ city on a hill? A neoconservative might decry as impossibly Bolshevik Thomas Paine’s repudiation of monarchy as the most dispensable of all the world’s political institutions. A liberal might recoil from John L. O’Sullivan’s notion of manifest destiny, even though its original formulation was benign and even progressive on its face. Historians might take umbrage at Carter Woodson’s charge that African-Americans, though central to the history of the nation, have been systematically ignored, even if the work “of such Progressive historians as Frederick Jackson Turner, V. L. Parrington, and Charles and Mary Beard.” And garden-variety isolationists will hop up and down over Baldwin’s inclusion of George C. Marshall and the plan that bears his name as expressive of any particular American ideal, particularly if it boils down to helping the French. All that said, Baldwin conjures up a neat trick: in identifying ten ideas that contain certain contradictory aspects and even pointed dilemmas, he emphasizes the very point that Americans have forged a delicate union even when they do not necessarily agree with each other on every matter of discussion—an idea that could stand sturdier legs in a time of division and exclusion. One of Baldwin’s exemplary Americans, the playwright Israel Zangwill, coiner of the image of America as melting pot, did a nice job, after all, of urging that the nation was “the promised land in which the best human ideals shall ultimately find solution.” And who could disagree? Well . . .
A readable exercise in civics, and surely more inclusive than, say, William Bennett’s or Lynne Cheney’s published views on what those best ideals might be.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-312-32543-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
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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