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WHEN TRUMPETS CALL

Name: WHEN TRUMPETS CALL
Author: Patricia O’Toole
ISBN: 0-684-86477-0

THEODORE ROOSEVELT AFTER THE WHITE HOUSE

by Patricia O’Toole ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2005

A mighty—and mighty trying—soul, very capably and vigorously scrutinized here.

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Teddy Roosevelt did not go gently into the good night of postpresidential politics; rather, writes O’Toole, he made as much of a stir out of office as in it, and “the last decade of his life would blind him to distinctions between the public interest and his own.”

No law forbade Roosevelt’s running for a third term in 1908, notes O’Toole (Money and Morals in America, 1998), but custom prevented it; indeed, the two-term limit had been “a sacred American precept” since the time of George Washington, who warned that a president entrenched in office too long would become a tyrant. Roosevelt was no tyrant, but he liked exercising power at his sole discretion, as when he gave a customs post to poet Edward Arlington Robinson for the good of literature, a job that Robinson had to be reminded to go to long enough to collect his paycheck. When he left office, Roosevelt had difficulty adjusting to his newfound inability to issue ukases; he consoled himself by going to Kenya and shooting everything he saw—his party bagged 512 African animals, including 8 elephants—and then returning to New York to conspire against his sometime friend and successor William Howard Taft, who protested that Roosevelt’s called-for regulatory and welfare reforms would require rewriting the Constitution. Roosevelt responded, ere long, by accusing Taft of “violating every canon of human ordinary decency and fair dealing,” which caused poor Taft to break down in tears. But Taft had the last laugh when Roosevelt was denied the Republican nomination in 1912, after which it was Democrat Woodrow Wilson’s turn to rule—and to withstand Roosevelt’s petitions, including the demand that he be given a colonel’s commission when the US entered WWI. Roosevelt’s response on being denied was characteristic: “Our rulers were supple and adroit,” he thundered, quoting the Bible, “but they were not mighty of soul.”

A mighty—and mighty trying—soul, very capably and vigorously scrutinized here.

Pub Date: March 1, 2005

ISBN: 0-684-86477-0

Page Count: 448

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

- BOOK REVIEW
THE MORALIST
by Patricia O’Toole

- BOOK REVIEW
MONEY AND MORALS IN AMERICA
by Patricia O’Toole

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

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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.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.