An admiring biography of a neglected figure in America's mid- 20th-century rise to global ascendancy. A scholarly study of the extraordinary career of David K.E. Bruce (18981977) would be welcome. Lankford, regrettably, has chosen to write a celebratory, one-dimensional study. A good storyteller, the author ladles out admiration for each of the privileged worlds that young Bruce inhabited: Born into the landed gentry of segregated Virginia, growing up in Gilded Age Baltimore, graduating from Princeton. As an officer in the postWW I army, Bruce developed a taste for the glories of war, sampled at a safe distance from any action. After marrying Ailsa Mellon, one of the wealthiest women in the world, Bruce became a confidant and art adviser to his father-in-law Andrew Mellon, one of the wealthiest men in the world. Lankford's greatest enthusiasm is reserved for Bruce's central role in building up the new postWW II American empire, based on free trade, global military interventionism, and a worldwide covert operations network. Like so many other Cold War power brokers, Bruce began a diplomatic career through his friendship with William ``Wild Bill'' Donovan, the founder of the OSS (later the CIA). Contacts in the intelligence community led to diplomatic appointments, including stints as ambassador to France and Britain, and a special mission to China. ``Tall, erect, gray- templed, distinguished in appearence, he was the model image of an ambassador,'' Lankford asserts. And his aristocratic indifference to the common people served him well in the rarefied world of old- boy networks in the intelligence and diplomatic communities. Bruce might have been, in his personal tastes and demeanor, the last American aristocrat (or at least the last to act as if governing was his by right), but he is far from being the last privileged American to step effortlessly from inherited wealth to immense political power.
Pub Date: Aug. 19, 1996
ISBN: 0-316-51501-9
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1996
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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