Former Illinois Republican Congressman Findley (Silent No More: Confronting America’s False Images of Islam, 2001, etc.) reflects on the time he served in office—1960 to 1982—and the lessons he learned over the years.
The congressman reminds us of the time when bipartisanship was the rule not the exception. As a middle-of-the-road Republican, he was a fiscal conservative but also active supporter of civil-rights legislation. Although he started off as a hawk, he became a proponent of ending the war in Vietnam. An admirer of Eisenhower, Findley also respected JFK and his measured approach during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Raised in a small town in Illinois, the author began his career as a reporter while still in high school—ultimately becoming the owner and publisher of the Pike County Republican—and his first taste of politics was during the 1936 election, when he supported Alf Landon against FDR. Astonishing today, the author writes that his first election victory cost “slightly less than $21,000, all paid in full the day before voting.” In 1973, Findley, who was part of a congressional group visiting the Middle East, met Yasser Arafat and became concerned about Israel's treatment of Palestinians. This was a transformative experience. “ I became convinced Palestinians had legitimate grievances against our government,” he writes. Overlooking all other relevant geopolitical issues, including the Cold War and the oil crises, the author writes that since the Kennedy Administration, “all U.S. Presidents have done the bidding of Israel's lobby, and the Congress has done the same,” resulting in “religious bias in foreign policy” and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. A serviceable overview of a distinguished career, somewhat marred by the author’s occasionally extremist views.
Pub Date: June 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-56976-625-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Lawrence Hill Books/Chicago Review
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2011
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
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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