A lively one-volume treatment well-suited to libraries and schools.
This focused study of the four term–winning president emphasizes his instinctive feel for the public mood.
Having previously written extensively about John F. Kennedy (Camelot’s Court and An Unfinished Life), among other presidents and world leaders (Nixon and Kissinger, The Lost Peace, Lone Star Rising, etc.), Dallek is a seasoned presidential historian and biographer. Here, he writes with authority about Franklin Roosevelt’s political life and mission to create a “new social order” during a time of “enduring national transformation.” Throughout his remarkable political career, Roosevelt managed to steer the country as “one organic entity, [reaffirming] that no interest, no class, no section, is either separate or supreme above the interests of all”—views he expressed in an interview before his first presidential win in 1932. This was especially surprising given his own patrician background (also that of his wife and cousin, Eleanor) and the general expectation of dictatorial leadership during the Depression crisis. Dallek examines several formative factors that contributed greatly to Roosevelt’s ability to successfully tap the public sentiment and address significant issues—e.g., his three years of practicing law, which helped bring him “out from under the shelter” of his hereditary social circle of “Hyde Park, Campobello, Cambridge, and 65th Street”; his formidably kind wife, who was truly alarmed by the living conditions of the poor and disenfranchised where she toured during the Depression, operating as his eyes and ears; and, of course, being stricken by polio and his trips to Warm Springs, Georgia, where he mingled with the similarly afflicted and marginalized. The author also effectively shows how Roosevelt was an astute political animal who sometimes made questionable decisions for political expedience, such as failing to push for an anti-lynching law for fear of losing white Southern support, incarcerating Japanese-Americans during World War II, and fumbling over saving Jews from persecution by Nazi Germany.
A lively one-volume treatment well-suited to libraries and schools.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-525-42790-2
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2017
SEEN & HEARD
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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