A distinguished historian’s fascinating WASP roots narrative that excels as family saga, revisionist American history, and inquiry into what we can possibly know about the past. In addition to sharing a family tree with the US President James K., famed journalist George, Wilson era diplomat Frank, and WWII General James, the author’s relatives have taken bows on every stage of American history, and can be traced all the way back to the 15th-century lowland Scotsman John Maxwell de Pollok, whose holdings included a small pond (—pollok— in Gaelic) south of Glasgow. Instead of wallowing in his ancestors’ triumphs, Polk (History/University of Chicago; Passing Brave, 1973, etc.) considers the sparse, misleading, and frequently apocryphal evidence that remains, and then works such evidence into the larger American scene. When documentation fails to disclose much about the 17th-century immigration of Protestant Scottish mercenary Robert Pollock to Lord Baltimore’s Catholic New World land grant colony on the Chesapeake Bay, Polk goes for the fun facts, offering miniature monographs on Indian relations (which were very good, at first), the inadequacies of the Scottish axe, the curious lack of dinner forks, and the grim hardships attending a failed tobacco plantation that—now a wildlife refuge—justly earned the sobriquet Polk’s Folly. We hear of inglorious Indian trader relatives, and nasty colonists who nearly doomed Washington’s Continental Army (with which Polk family members wintered at Valley Forge) with bad provisions, desertions, and betrayals to the British. Gathering momentum in discussing the 19th-century perils of James, a Union calvary officer imprisoned during the Civil War who later gunned down one of Judge Roy Bean’s corrupt cohorts, the chronicle soars into the 20th century with gripping accounts of the notorious Zimmerman telegram and Patton’s tank battles, concluding with the murder of journalist James. Brilliant historical narrative that celebrates, in family members and the nation as a whole, an abundance of heroism, tragedy, guts, and glory.
Pub Date: Jan. 18, 2000
ISBN: 0-385-49150-6
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1999
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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