A fine account of FDR’s rise to power combined with a cradle-to-grave biography of the man who made it possible.
Two giants of 20th-century American politics receive an insightful dual biography.
Franklin Roosevelt (1882-1945) is no stranger to historians, but Politico senior editor Golway (Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics, 2014, etc.) wisely wraps matters up after he became president in 1933. Until then, fellow New Yorker Al Smith (1873-1944) was better known. Born on the Lower East Side, Smith struggled financially, but he impressed the local Tammany boss, who sent him to Albany in 1904 as assemblyman. Though initially frustrated by bureaucracy, he hid “his frustration behind a mask of good cheer” and became a leading reformer. Wealthy and bored by practicing law, Roosevelt fell in love with politics. Winning a state Senate seat in 1910, he concentrated on national affairs, supporting Woodrow Wilson in 1912 and earning appointment as Assistant Secretary of the Navy. Golway dates the “alliance” to the 1920 Democratic presidential convention, when Smith, then the governor of New York, asked Roosevelt to second his nomination. Quiescent for years after his 1921 paralysis, Roosevelt supported Smith for governor in 1922, 1924, and 1926. Running for president in 1928, Smith convinced Roosevelt to run for governor. Roosevelt’s victory immediately made him a contender for 1932. It also ended their alliance. Crushed by his defeat, Smith felt ignored by the new governor. Detesting Roosevelt’s New Deal, he supported Alfred Landon in 1936 and Wendell Willkie in 1940. Historians, Golway included, agree that Smith was the more forthright, unwilling to sacrifice ideals for political gain. Thus, both men hated Prohibition. Roosevelt gets credit for repeal in 1933 when support had weakened, but he waffled when it would lose votes during the 1920s. Smith never wavered, but it cost him.
A fine account of FDR’s rise to power combined with a cradle-to-grave biography of the man who made it possible.Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-08964-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
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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