That project continues, of course, in different hands all these years after Nixon’s coverup of a coverup. No one who reads...
Sobering, eye-opening study of Richard Nixon’s booze-soaked, paranoid White House years and the endless tragedies they wrought.
“The press is the enemy. The establishment is the enemy. The professors are the enemy.” So said Nixon, who never minded making room for one more name on his fabled—though very real—enemies list. It speaks volumes about Nixon that there is still more to learn about him, 40-plus years after Watergate. It speaks further volumes that what we are learning is even worse than what we knew: John Dean’s The Nixon Defense (2014) just scratches the surface. Enter Pulitzer and National Book Award winner Weiner (American Studies/Princeton Univ.; Enemies: A History of the FBI, 2012, etc.), who is particularly interested in Nixon’s fraught efforts to disengage from Vietnam while not appearing to abandon an American ally. “Why not give this up?” asked Chinese leader Zhou Enlai, who encouraged Nixon to get out, promising that if the war were to continue, China would be honor-bound to help its communist neighbor. Alas, writes the author, Nixon and the ever sycophantic Henry Kissinger could never figure out how to pull that off. Weiner’s findings, drawing on the entirety of Nixon’s secret tapes and other documents, are certainly newsworthy: Nixon, for instance, busily selling ambassadorships, wanted to dismantle not just the State Department, but effectively the whole of the government, filling its ranks with loyalists. So bent was he on this that he put into motion a plan to have his entire Cabinet resign the day after the election, with the next step to “rebrand the Republican Party in coalition with conservative Democrats, create what he called a New Majority to last until the end of the twentieth century, and destroy the remnants of LBJ’s Great Society once and for all.”
That project continues, of course, in different hands all these years after Nixon’s coverup of a coverup. No one who reads this incisive book will be nostalgic for Nixon, no matter how disastrous his successors.Pub Date: July 21, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-62779-083-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2015
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
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.
In her first nonfiction book, novelist Grande (Dancing with Butterflies, 2009, etc.) delves into her family’s cycle of separation and reunification.
Raised in poverty so severe that spaghetti reminded her of the tapeworms endemic to children in her Mexican hometown, the author is her family’s only college graduate and writer, whose honors include an American Book Award and International Latino Book Award. Though she was too young to remember her father when he entered the United States illegally seeking money to improve life for his family, she idolized him from afar. However, she also blamed him for taking away her mother after he sent for her when the author was not yet 5 years old. Though she emulated her sister, she ultimately answered to herself, and both siblings constantly sought affirmation of their parents’ love, whether they were present or not. When one caused disappointment, the siblings focused their hopes on the other. These contradictions prove to be the narrator’s hallmarks, as she consistently displays a fierce willingness to ask tough questions, accept startling answers, and candidly render emotional and physical violence. Even as a girl, Grande understood the redemptive power of language to define—in the U.S., her name’s literal translation, “big queen,” led to ridicule from other children—and to complicate. In spelling class, when a teacher used the sentence “my mamá loves me” (mi mamá me ama), Grande decided to “rearrange the words so that they formed a question: ¿Me ama mi mamá? Does my mama love me?”
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6177-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
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