Gives credit where due, but not in a manner that is likely to please conservative partisans.
Part primer, part polemic, this graphic biography scratches the surface of what its creators depict as a comic-book presidency.
Though the life of Ronald Reagan has previously inspired a number of longer biographies, even some of those have suggested that the challenge of coming to terms with the “Great Communicator” is that there wasn’t much intellectual depth beneath the actor’s engaging façade. Written by Helfer (Malcolm X: A Graphic Biography, 2006, etc.), a former group editor at DC Comics, this hit-and-run graphic narrative reinforces that position, taking a tour through the life of a man who began playing roles as a nearsighted teenage lifeguard (when his record of 77 rescues was apparently inflated by aiding those who were in no danger of drowning) and then mastered the art of dramatizing baseball games where he wasn’t in attendance as a studio radio announcer. In Hollywood, he made more of an impression as a union activist and corporate pitchman than through most of the roles he secured as an actor, while failing at a first marriage that seemed more like a career convenience. It was in politics he found his greatest success, the role of a lifetime, as long as he kept things simple and stuck to the script. (When he went off-message, he was likely to make claims that had no basis in fact.) The narrative touches all the high points: his transformation into conservative crusader and election to the governorship of California, the adoring Nancy, the striking contrast he presented to the ineffectual Jimmy Carter, a presidency marked by an assassination attempt and the Iran-Contra, arms-for-hostages scandal (one of the controversies that the Teflon president deflected with a convenient lapse of memory), the long fade into the Alzheimer’s sunset.
Gives credit where due, but not in a manner that is likely to please conservative partisans.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-8090-9507-0
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2007
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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