As with anything by Buckley, it is fluent and gossipy (the scene involving Ludwig von Mises and Ayn Rand is a howler), fun...
Two conservative icons meet in a well-considered book, as they often did in life.
Buckley (The Rake, 2007, etc.), who recently passed away at the age of 82, opens with a charming anecdote of an adventure he and Barry Goldwater shared in Antarctica, long after the latter’s unsuccessful bid for the White House in 1964. Ever the scholar—though that was not part of his public persona—Goldwater took the occasion to discourse on ice and Antarctica’s abundance thereof. “There is everything there, potentially: the control of the weather; the answer to the fresh-water problem,” Goldwater expounded. “A vat of energy greater than the known supply of the world’s oil. If I had been elected president, you’d have seen it all come to life.” Buckley knew something of that bid, having engineered the making of Goldwater’s soi-disant autobiography The Conscience of a Conservative. One impetus for that book was Richard Nixon, who “had the grit and skill of a seasoned politician” and was the GOP’s only real possibility in the 1960 race against John F. Kennedy, but who failed to stir Republicans at the convention, much less the rest of the American people. Goldwater, Buckley and his conservative colleagues at the National Review, had the ability to stir emotions—though in directions they might not have foreseen when they commissioned Brent Bozell to ghost-write Conscience in 1959. That book, Buckley notes, came in short and late, but it was a hit all the same, and it afforded a series of talking points for Republicans for the next four years. This book is as much a history of the rightward drift of the GOP, which allowed the likes of Reagan and Bush II into office, as it is of Goldwater himself.
As with anything by Buckley, it is fluent and gossipy (the scene involving Ludwig von Mises and Ayn Rand is a howler), fun to read and newsworthy.Pub Date: May 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-465-00836-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2008
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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