It would have been nice to see clips from his Hollywood career, but those who miss the political Ronald Reagan will find the...
To mark the Reagan centenary in 2011, Simon and Schuster is re-releasing the 40th president’s 1990 memoir in several formats, including this enhanced electronic edition.
While this format is up-to-the-minute, the prose and multimedia accompanying it (17 video clips, courtesy of CBS News) are firmly 20th century in origin and outlook. Famous for his sunny disposition, which seemingly spread to the nation like an infectious disease during his two terms in the 1980s, Reagan’s memoir reads like a series of screen treatments for Capra-esque movies starring the author as, alternately, a Jimmy Stewart–like stumbling naïf, and a Gary Cooper–ish man of quiet strength who shoots from the hip and speaks nothing but the plain truth. The videos complement this carefully crafted Reagan image, beginning with his elegiac address to the 1992 Republican convention in which he catalogued the momentous events he had witnessed in his eight decades: two World Wars, the Great Depression, a seething Cold War and the summits he took part in to end it. The clips, including several portions of fawning interviews over the years with Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes, show Reagan in his white Stetson, on his Rancho del Cielo, staring soulfully into First Lady Nancy’s eyes, and doing the political job he always did best: making speeches to adoring audiences who hung on his every word.
It would have been nice to see clips from his Hollywood career, but those who miss the political Ronald Reagan will find the enhanced e-book a suitably worshipful souvenir.Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4391-4148-9
Page Count: -
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 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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