Together, Churchill and Manchester—the lion and the lionizer, the quotable and the quoter, the anecdoted and the anecdotist—can hardly miss in the marketplace. Even those who know better may find 900 pp. of juicy Churchilliana hard to pass up. This is extravagance, however, with a motive. When Manchester writes that Churchill, after Dunkirk, "spoke. . . to the English people as no one had before or ever would again," he has in mind the end of Empire, and the romantic, bellicose, paternalistic Churchill as its last great embodiment. It's a splendid theme, at any rate, for a spectacle—with flares shooting off in all directions. Churchill, to Manchester, is a 19th-century man—but also the inventor of the tank and an early champion of air power (on both of which M. has fine, fresh material). He's a consummate politician, a hopeless politician. (Similarly, Stanley Baldwin is "a shrewder politician than Churchill" on p. 784; "in his long career"—on p. 799—"Baldwin did few clever things.") "As a youth [Churchill] decided that the great issues of his time would be decided on the battlefield." As a child, he suppressed his rage against his parents, turning his hostility inward, becoming a depressive; in war, he found an outlet for his aggression and, in bolshevism and Hitler, worthy enemies, The book is erratic, inconsistent, undiscriminating in other respects too. To absolve Churchill of blame for Gallipoli (a major stress), Manchester cites Rhodes James and Liddell Hart—the best of sources; to fill out his murderous portraits of mother Jennie and especially father Randolph, he leans on Frank Harris (and can't understand why people don't credit Harris' tale of how RC contracted syphilis). He writes sniggeringly of Jennie's lovers (and other sexual matters—referring repeatedly, for instance, to "the expensive Dutch cup" and other contraceptive curiosa)—but he also provides a sparkling account of young Winston's Kaiser Wilhelm/Crystal Palace weekend with Count Kinsky. Periodically, he catalogues what's-going-on-in-Britain: a paragraph on the theater, sheer writerly legerdemain ("At his Majesty's Theatre you could see . . ."), climaxes in a crackling bit of WC/GBS badinage. The book has no proportion; but except as political history, it does have the virtues of its excesses. In a curious way, however, Manchester's massively detailed glorification of Churchill has the same effect as Robert Caro's recent, massively detailed damnation of Lyndon Johnson: it sets up counter-currents. We are reminded of Churchill's dogged intervention in the Russian civil war and, subsequently, of "his visceral reaction against socialism—he was always mistaking pink for red." We're reminded, apropos of his fight against Indian self-government (which Manchester tries hard to justify), of his lifelong racial prejudice. The book ends, in 1932, with Lady Astor's assurance to Hitler: "Churchill? . . . Oh, he's finished." As a curtain-line, terrific (if unsubtle). But Manchester may also have demonstrated, by this omnium-gatherum, why Churchill's greatness lay in wartime leadership.
Pub Date: May 2, 1983
ISBN: 0385313489
Page Count: 996
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1983
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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