Obama has been profiled many times but seldom with so practical an outlook. An excellent view of politics from the inside.
Longtime political adviser Axelrod, late of the White House, tells most of what he’s seen in the cloakroom.
Barack Obama is intensely competitive, a fighter. He drinks a little and swears a lot, sometimes exultantly, and he’s disappointed: he thought he could do business with John Boehner, but no—and if you think racism has nothing to do with it, as Axelrod resignedly writes, “some folks simply refuse to accept the legitimacy of the first black president and are seriously discomforted by the growing diversity of our country.” Though the comedians Key and Peele have hilariously imagined an angry black alter ego for the president, Axelrod assures us that Obama remains above the racial fray, always rational and calm, “welcome qualities after the bombast and bluster of the Bush-Cheney era.” Partisan zingers are comparatively and surprisingly few for so renowned a street fighter. Instead, Axelrod concentrates on spinning yarns about how things get done in the day-to-day tumble of politics and, of course, on his former boss, whom he obviously admires while wishing, perhaps, that the gloves would come off a bit more often. The author writes that he was introduced to Obama in 1992 with the assurance, from a Democratic activist, that here “could be the first black president,” but the actual mechanics of how that happened are of greater interest in the telling, with Axelrod tracing deep connections to the political enterprise of another Illinoisan—not Lincoln but Paul Simon, the nerdy but powerful scholar who managed to get a lot done in his years in Washington. Axelrod’s careful connection of the dots provides an illuminating study in how political power moves from generation to generation. The book-closing call to remake politics would sound like so much cheerleading in other hands, but Axelrod’s connecting of Obama to JFK makes it work.
Obama has been profiled many times but seldom with so practical an outlook. An excellent view of politics from the inside.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-59420-587-3
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
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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