A top-notch campaign examination. If, like so many others, you wonder what on earth happened in November 2016, this is all...
An in-depth dissection of Hillary Clinton’s second campaign for the presidency, a failure on many counts—except, of course, that of the popular vote.
Why did Clinton, arguably the most capable presidential candidate fielded by any of the parties, not take the White House? The reasons are many, and they combined in a perfect storm. At least that’s one takeaway from this readable, endlessly fascinating autopsy by Roll Call columnist Allen and The Hill White House correspondent Parnes, who co-authored HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton (2014). One spoiler was Bernie Sanders, who entered the race somewhat reluctantly as a Democrat. Another was that pesky business of email sent and received from a private server while Clinton was secretary of state, a matter that, Allen and Parnes note, bothered Barack Obama much more than he ever let on: “It was a classic unforced Clinton error, and he couldn’t believe that she and the people around her had let it happen.” It didn’t help that the director of the FBI raised the matter of the email just before the election, a move that could not help but cost her votes. Another was the choice of a vice presidential candidate who had all the personality of a brick, a choice dictated mostly by political calculus. Still another was the rising tide of screw-it populism that saw Donald Trump—the favorite of very few voters, as it turns out—into office and which Bill Clinton, by the authors’ account, correctly foretold in looking at the Brexit vote in the U.K. And why didn’t Bill, more popular after his presidency than just about any other executive, do more to pitch in and campaign for his wife? In part because, the authors write, Hillary wanted to avoid the perception that she was riding his coattails, while he wanted to keep face-saving distance just in case she lost.
A top-notch campaign examination. If, like so many others, you wonder what on earth happened in November 2016, this is all the explanation you need.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-553-44708-8
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: April 25, 2017
IN THE NEWS
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
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