Earnest, committed, and even contentious, a text that will cause liberals to smile and conservatives to gnash their teeth.
A senior senator from Ohio highlights the careers, accomplishments, and proposals of mentors and former colleagues.
Brown (Myths of Free Trade: Why American Trade Policy Has Failed, 2004, etc.) arranges his text chronologically, from Sen. Hugo Black, who served from 1927 to 1937, to Sen. George McGovern, 1963-1981. Some of the names will be familiar to readers (Al Gore Sr.; Robert F. Kennedy), but a few—Theodore Francis Green, 1937-1961; Glen Taylor, 1945-1951—are less well known. Desk 88 is the number of Brown’s desk in the Senate chamber, and he reveals that senators traditionally sign the inside before they leave office. Desk 88 bears the signatures of four of the senators he writes about: Black, Gore, Herbert H. Lehman, and McGovern (and now his own). “What drew me to the names at Desk 88 was the idea that connected them: progressivism,” he writes. For each of his eight men, the author provides a brisk biography and a description of his Senate career; following each chapter is a section called “Thoughts from Desk 88,” ruminations about his own experiences, thoughts about issues dear to him, and comments about Republicans and Donald Trump (who, he writes, “promote a racist, phony populism”). In his “Thoughts” sections, Brown writes about his own family and background, the birth of Social Security, minimum wage laws, Wall Street corruption, race, health care issues, world hunger, and policy (with some nasty stories about GOP opposition to the Affordable Care Act—“death panels” and the like). The author argues that Democratic candidates should pound away at the GOP’s opposition to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, minimum wage protections, and so on. At times, in fact, his text reads almost like a campaign biography, but in March 2019, Brown withdrew from 2020 presidential consideration.
Earnest, committed, and even contentious, a text that will cause liberals to smile and conservatives to gnash their teeth.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-374-13821-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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