Naftali (Blind Spot: The Secret History of American Counterterrorism, 2005, etc.) offers a soft-pedaling, well-paced glimpse...
Latest title in the American Presidents Series spotlights the elder Bush’s uneven one-term presidency, riding Reagan’s coattails and navigating the “new world order.”
Son of a Republican senator from Connecticut, educated at Phillips Academy and Yale, a naval aviator during World War II, George Herbert Walker Bush forged a path unique from his father’s by moving to West Texas with wife Barbara to grow rich as an oil man. He lost Senate runs in 1964 and 1970, his mixture of social liberalism and economic conservatism doomed by compromises on key issues. Expedient and tactical, pragmatic and emotional, Bush won a congressional election in 1966 thanks to his friend James A. Baker III. Briefly considered as Nixon’s running mate, he was instead offered a job as United Nations representative, then chairman of the Republican National Committee. After a stint as UN representative to China and head of the CIA under Gerald Ford, Bush ran for president against Ronald Reagan and was again sidelined as an understudy. Vice President Bush was Reagan’s loyal soldier and crisis manager, a key participant in the controversial Iran-Contra scandal and coverup. His political adaptability was often taken as a sign of weakness. “Fighting the Wimp Factor” became his presidential campaign’s rallying cry against Bob Dole and Michael Dukakis. Cleaning up Reagan’s mess marked the beginning of his presidency, which was plagued by the budget deficit, the savings-and-loan debacle, the intransigence of Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega and Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. However, the unraveling of the Soviet bloc allowed Bush moments of greatness. These did not protect him from becoming an object of public scorn and being roundly defeated in 1992 by Democrat Bill Clinton.
Naftali (Blind Spot: The Secret History of American Counterterrorism, 2005, etc.) offers a soft-pedaling, well-paced glimpse at the career highlights of a man whose presidency still remains murky and out-of-focus.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-8050-6966-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2007
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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