The lives of few American labor leaders have been given as thorough and caring an examination as that of Sidney Hillman in this massive biography by Fraser, the executive editor of Basic Books. Fraser shows how Hillman's early experience as an agitator in revolutionary Russia and as an immigrant toiling in America's textile industry shaped his outlook on the ``labor question'' for the rest of his life. Indeed, Fraser depicts how Hillman's passionate belief in the dignity of working people translated into his advocacy of a national labor policy that would shield American workers from the vicissitudes of the market system and provide them with economic security and equal rights in the work place. The author also painstakingly details how this led Hillman to seek an alliance with progressive industrialists and leaders of the Democratic Party to achieve his goals. Hillman's successes, from the Protocols of Peace to the organizing of the CIO, and his access to Franklin Roosevelt (memorialized in FDR's quip, ``Clear it with Sidney''), contained, Fraser argues, the seeds of organized labor's fall in the decades after WW II—a crucial paradox to Fraser, for as Hillman and organized labor succeeded in improving the living standards of American workers, they did so by forsaking their demand to include labor's voice in managing the American economy. An impressive work that both vividly documents the life of one of America's foremost labor leaders and manages to address a number of questions about the rise and fall of American labor and the Democratic Party over the course of the 20th century.
Pub Date: June 25, 1991
ISBN: 0-02-910630-3
Page Count: 600
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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