A sympathetic, well-rounded complement to Robert Caro’s monumental biography-in-progress.
Lyndon Johnson was the architect of his own downfall, as this sprawling biography shows.
Who knew that at the instant LBJ heard the crack of Oswald’s rifle on that November morning in Dallas, he “was both exhilarated and apprehensive”? Defying commonsensical convention, Woods (History/Univ. of Arkansas) presumes to inhabit the president’s mind at key moments, and he over-dramatizes where plenty of drama is already in play. Despite these blemishes, Woods’s life of the blustering Texan who found John Kennedy too conservative has many virtues. He ably depicts how childhood circumstances—poverty, an alcoholic father, a domineering mother—forged Johnson’s character, and often not to the good; by the time he entered college, LBJ had a knack for making enemies and a tendency to bully and manipulate others into doing his dirty work. He was secretive and aggressive, earning the nickname “Bull” for his rough ways and nonstop talking. For all his flaws, though, Johnson evolved into a definitive politician brilliantly skilled at forging strange-bedfellows alliances and making compromises. One of his first acts on entering the Senate was to forge a close relationship with Georgian Richard Russell, a segregationist and right-winger who was also a master of persuasion and vote-getting. Johnson quickly learned, and he outpaced the master, who exclaimed, “The son of a bitch, you can’t say no to him!” LBJ kept the South Democratic; he gathered power carefully, amassing blackmail-worthy dossiers on his colleagues, and used that power to win pitched battles—all fine, so long as he was striving for social justice and racial equality. Alas, Vietnam derailed him, and Woods’s book closes lingeringly on a president so broken by that distant war that he welcomed the prospect of either Bobby Kennedy’s or Richard Nixon’s taking over the White House to “heal the wounds now separating the country.”
A sympathetic, well-rounded complement to Robert Caro’s monumental biography-in-progress.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-684-83458-8
Page Count: 1024
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 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
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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