Republican VP candidate Paul Ryan provides an enthusiastic endorsement, and like-minded readers will find Shlaes’...
President from 1923 to 1929, Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) is traditionally dismissed as an honorable mediocrity, but journalist Shlaes (The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, 2007, etc.) argues that he was better than that.
The author makes a convincing case, but readers who don’t share her conservative views may not agree that he was superior to FDR, whom she skewered in The Forgotten Man. Raised in rural Vermont, Coolidge practiced law in Massachusetts. His celebrated New England reserve describes him accurately, but he was popular and flourished in Republican state politics. Progressive at first, he steadily grew less so, backing William Howard Taft against Theodore Roosevelt in 1912. As governor, he achieved national fame and the vice presidency by crushing the 1919 Boston police strike. Taking over after President Warren Harding’s death, Coolidge set to work reducing federal taxes, expenses and personnel. By contemporary standards, he was a moderate. His opposition to business regulation and social programs provoked only modest controversy. Times were prosperous, and he got the credit and became very popular. Clearly an admirer, Shlaes stresses that, under Coolidge, the budget was balanced, tax cuts reduced the top rate by half, the national debt fell, and unemployment remained below five percent. Wages rose and interest rates fell, as well, so the poor had jobs and could borrow money more easily. Most historians portray the 1920s as a simpler time, but the author maintains that Coolidge’s hands-off, minimal government, free-market approach remains ideal.
Republican VP candidate Paul Ryan provides an enthusiastic endorsement, and like-minded readers will find Shlaes’ well-researched but highly opinionated biography deeply satisfying.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-196755-9
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2012
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 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
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