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TAKING ON THE WORLD

JOSEPH AND STEWART ALSOP--GUARDIANS OF THE AMERICAN CENTURY

A vigorous biography (the second this year: see Edwin M. Yoder Jr.'s Joe Alsop's Cold War, p. 156) of the brothers whose journalistic opinion shaped American foreign policy through much of the Cold War. Writing in journals like the Saturday Evening Post, the New York Herald Tribune, and especially Newsweek, Joseph (191089) and Stewart (191474) Alsop espoused militant anticommunism and a robust vision of America as the world's one rightful superpower. They grew up among affluent bluebloods who would advise America's postwar leaders, and they had unprecedented access to presidents from Truman to Carter. Under the Kennedy administration the Alsops reached their zenith as shapers of opinion, offering the president their views on sweeping matters of state and translating Kennedy's aims for their readers. Joseph, the better known of the two, was ``an aristocrat with aristocratic tastes and an aristocratic bearing,'' and also a world-traveling ``shoe-leather reporter.'' Stewart was the more analytical, given to ``long expository pieces designed to lay bare the inner workings of government and the intricacies of major issues.'' Reaching millions of readers, this journalistic tag team redefined the role of the media in American politics, exerting an influence that Merry, executive editor of Congressional Quarterly Publications and former Wall Street Journal Washington correspondent, masterfully explores. (Those who complain that the so-called liberal news media enjoy too much power today ought to note that the way was paved by archconservatives.) But the Alsops were not mere cheerleaders for the power elite, Merry writes; they criticized several administrations for not confronting Russian and Chinese communist expansion more directly. And whereas both Alsops are remembered as hawks, Merry shows that the confusion of Vietnam caused them more than once to reconsider. In the aftermath of that fiasco, their faith in American power bowed but not broken, Joseph summed up their beliefs: ``Nothing endures, because there is always change, and there is always war.'' An important and thoroughly well written addition to the literature on ``the American century.'' (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996

ISBN: 0-670-83868-3

Page Count: 672

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

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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