Sincere and uplifting stories of being a mother, a wife, and a career woman while juggling the responsibilities of being the...
A former second lady talks about her family, relationships, and career as an educator.
In this often poignant retelling, Biden shares some of the more meaningful moments of her life. She tells how she married when she was 18 and then divorced, an act that made her hesitant to enter into marriage again. But she was wooed by then Sen. Joe Biden and fell in love despite her previous failed marriage and fears of being a mother to two young boys. Throughout, the author discusses the importance of family and traditions, such as lighting candles for an evening meal or traveling to Nantucket for Thanksgiving, and of her prankster nature as a child and adult. She shares how the Bidens stand together as a united front in the face of adversity, something that has helped them through extremely difficult times, most significantly the death of Beau Biden from brain cancer in 2015. She explores her insecurities and introverted nature, two issues that made it difficult to be in the spotlight as the wife of a public figure. However, she was able to overcome these concerns in order to present speeches and provide support for her husband during his run for president and later when he became vice president during the Obama administration. The author also shows us her deep involvement with her students and the importance of having her own career and rewarding work with military families and the education of girls and women. Biden’s tone is conversational and partially confessional, an endearing quality. Through this personal disclosure, readers gain insight into the fortitude and courage it takes to be a woman with a career and a close-knit family, with the obligations that come with a life as the second lady.
Sincere and uplifting stories of being a mother, a wife, and a career woman while juggling the responsibilities of being the vice president’s wife.Pub Date: May 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-18232-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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