An excellent resource that hews to the president’s words as reflecting or obscuring his actions.
A fine, fully fleshed portrait of Franklin Roosevelt during his final years, in his own words.
As he did in his previous volume, Franklin D. Roosevelt: Road to the New Deal: 1882-1939 (2015), Daniels (Emeritus, History/Univ. of Cincinnati) sticks to FDR’s public utterances, offering extensive extracts of speeches and communiqués to elucidate the evolution of his wartime policy. The early probing question—during the 1940 presidential campaign, as FDR was champing at the bit to aid beleaguered Britain while skirting the prevailing isolationist atmosphere in America—remains: “to what degree the president was deliberately misleading the American people about his foreign policy intentions”? The answer, from the record Daniels presents, was a great deal. However, the author fairly examines the communiqués regarding the peace mission with the Japanese in late 1941 (just prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor), and the president seemed to be sincerely hoping to maintain peace in the Pacific as long as possible rather than provoke a Japanese attack. During these fraught war years, FDR and his administration were particularly concerned with managing the civilian economy in support of the war effort, as the substantial body of this work takes up in detail. Daniels spotlights FDR’s early and extraordinary emphasis on creating the future United Nations. He had a vision of a peaceful postwar world when no peace was in sight, and he pushed for the prosecution of war criminals. Moreover, Daniels exposes the duplicitous “spin” given by the White House physician, who deliberately underplayed (or ignored) the severity of the president’s heart condition. The author does a fine historical service in allowing FDR’s rich, wise, moving words to emerge here, giving an illuminating portrait of a president in time of unprecedented world crisis.
An excellent resource that hews to the president’s words as reflecting or obscuring his actions.Pub Date: March 30, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-252-03952-2
Page Count: 712
Publisher: Univ. of Illinois
Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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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