An authoritative analysis of power and politics in contemporary France.
An optimistic view of France’s future under Emmanuel Macron.
Journalist Pedder, the Paris bureau chief of the Economist and commentator on French politics for CNN and the BBC, makes her literary debut with an insightful examination of the rise, vision, and potential impact of France’s youngest president. Based on interviews with Macron, his staff, scores of politicians (including Macron’s combative right-wing opponent, Marine Le Pen), as well as ordinary French citizens, the author offers an adroit, revealing overview of contemporary France and its dynamic leader. Macron, as Pedder portrays him, is nothing less than extraordinary, with “an ability to think ahead and see the big picture; a capacity to create and exploit opportunities, and take risks; and a determination, bordering on ruthlessness.” Calm, focused, and hardworking, he “knows what he wants, and what he needs to do to get it.” Early in his career, he had his eye on the presidency: He spent two years as adviser to François Hollande and then served another two years as his economy minister. Although positioned “at the heart of the French establishment,” when he mounted his own campaign, he ran as an outsider, a disrupter, whose new party attracted the liberal center. Pedder ascribes his success to his “transgressive personality, an insolent ambition, a calculating visionary mind—and a big splash of luck.” Scandals enveloping some opponents, as well as Le Pen’s disastrous performance in a TV debate, helped to bolster Macron’s image. The author underscores the difference between Macron and his predecessors, Jacques Chirac (“a professional schemer, old-school charmer and political chameleon”), flamboyant Nicolas Sarkozy, and tepid Hollande. She also offers a cleareyed view of Macron’s many challenges, notably the “fracture running through the country, between prosperous and confident metropolitan centres and the drive-past second-tier towns and deserted rural areas.” With only one year’s administration to examine, the author draws on Macron’s campaign promises to delineate his ambitions for addressing problems in education, unemployment, immigration, globalization, and relationships with the rest of Europe and America.
An authoritative analysis of power and politics in contemporary France.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4729-4860-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Bloomsbury Continuum
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
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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