A little late in the coming, since we’ll soon be arguing about a new president. Still, a useful look back over eight years...
Barack Obama: dictator; secret Muslim; al-Qaida operative. If you’ve heard this sort of thing and want to argue against it, political consultant Hannah offers a useful primer.
It’s a useful thing indeed to have a compendium of opposition charges about, say, Obamacare being “an unmitigated disaster” or Benghazi being the modern Watergate and responses to them, especially since the Obama administration has seemed so uninterested in advancing those responses on its own hook. Hannah, a specialist in message-crafting, looks in turn at the usual conservative charges, beginning with the overarching first premise: namely, that Obama is a dictator, inclined to go it alone without the advice and consent of Congress and independent of reference to the Constitution. Nonsense, Hannah writes, even though “this line of argument actually [has begun] to resonate with the American people,” having been repeated ad infinitum on Fox News. The reality, writes the author, is that given an intransigently obstructionist Congress, Obama “has not been bashful about his use of executive orders”—even though Obama has used the executive order less than any other president since Grover Cleveland, who left office in 1897. But why did Obama pursue the much-hated bailout of Wall Street? Because Congress authorized him to do so, if perhaps not down to the last dime. But it didn’t work, did it? It did, and instead of making Wall Street into a socialist extension of the Federal Reserve, “the president invested in a market-driven…solution.” Seated next to a Bill O’Reilly–spouting uncle, readers of this completely reasonable book might sound like the voice of reason, but that begs the question: is there room in the current din for anything that’s not a shout, and is anyone going to listen anyway? Veteran illustrator Staake provides the visual accompaniments.
A little late in the coming, since we’ll soon be arguing about a new president. Still, a useful look back over eight years that, depending on your point of view, were the best of times or the worst of times.Pub Date: June 28, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-244305-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
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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