A quick, smoothly readable account of Lincoln the political striver, the embodiment of the Declaration’s “central idea…that...
The editor of the National Review sketches the political character of our 16th president.
Ever since his assassination and swift elevation to the pantheon of our greatest presidents, “getting right with Lincoln,” in the memorable phrase of one historian, has been the business of our mainstream politicians. As they grope to align themselves with Lincoln’s legacy, unembarrassed by any “ideological body snatching,” much mischief ensues. To discover what Lincoln truly believed, Lowry (Legacy: Paying the Price for the Clinton Years, 2009, etc.) confines himself largely to Lincoln's pre-presidential career, explaining how the backwoods boy of little schooling and negligible property early on identified with the Whigs rather than the Jacksonian Democrats who captured so many of his similarly situated peers. The Rail-Splitter, he argues, is best understood not as a man of the axe but of the book, not so much by his origins as by his aspirations. For the deeply ambitious Lincoln, enhancing opportunity was the animating principle of his politics, and he committed himself to a program of uplift and improvement that offered the best chance for his fellow citizens to transcend their upbringings. Personally, Lincoln avoided most vices, and he preached and exemplified the habits of self-control, rationality and industriousness. Politically, he elevated the value of work, held property sacrosanct and looked to the Founding Fathers as a guide for renewing an American spirit gone flabby. Lowry sets out Lincoln’s platform: enthusiastic support for economic growth, internal improvements, new technologies, education and a sound national banking system; a profound respect for our constitutional system and free institutions; and a refusal to engage in class warfare, to sentimentalize agrarianism or to denigrate achievement. Some readers are bound to accuse Lowry of nudging Lincoln into the author’s own preferred categories of belief, but they’ll be hard-pressed to find any violation of the historical record.
A quick, smoothly readable account of Lincoln the political striver, the embodiment of the Declaration’s “central idea…that every man can make himself.”Pub Date: June 11, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-212378-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Broadside Books/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
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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