A massive, occasionally bloated (will the next volume also run over 1,000 pages?) study of the formation of the young...
Exhaustive account of the first half of Kissinger’s life as a “tale of an education through experience.”
Courted by Kissinger to write this biography 10 years ago (“it was written at his suggestion”), Hoover Institution senior research fellow Ferguson (History, Harvard Univ.; The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die, 2013, etc.) is both fascinated and seduced by the dazzling intellectual breadth of the senior statesman, now in his 90s. From Kissinger’s childhood in Germany, as the Nazis were ascendant, to participating in the official U.S. diplomatic effort to end the Vietnam War, the author finds Kissinger’s development falling into formative stages: seeing his civil servant father stripped of his livelihood and the family terrorized as Orthodox Jews before escaping to New York in 1938; returning to Germany via the Army Specialized Training Program during World War II, followed by de-Nazification work in the ruins of the Third Reich; schooling at Harvard courtesy of the GI Bill, where he found an important mentor in William Elliott and the choice of history for his academic work, specifically the sometimes-fraught choices that freedom awards an individual; his role as a public intellectual, writing about the new “great game” in “psychological warfare” just as the Cold War was heating up; and, finally, the harsh lessons he gained in political reality as adviser to Nelson Rockefeller and as one of John F. Kennedy’s fallible “best and brightest.” In his pronouncements on the war in Vietnam, Ferguson insists Kissinger was an idealist first and foremost: he was “committed to resisting the Communist advance and an advocate of ‘limited war.’ ” Bit by bit, Kissinger was becoming a foreign policy expert with “few rivals.” Ferguson also gives a thorough—sometimes long-winded—assessment of Kissinger’s use of conjecture and risk in policymaking.
A massive, occasionally bloated (will the next volume also run over 1,000 pages?) study of the formation of the young Kissinger, before the idealist became a realist with his selection by President Richard Nixon as national security adviser in 1968.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-59420-653-5
Page Count: 1008
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
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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