A majestic, authoritative multigenerational saga.
A family’s history chronicles the history of the nation.
Journalist and biographer Meier draws on hundreds of hours of interviews and prodigious archival research to craft an absorbing narrative following four generations of one of America’s most prominent families. Men take the center stage: Patriarch Lazarus Morgenthau (1815-1897), a German Jew who arrived in New York in 1866; his formidable son Henry, a man with “outsized ambition” and a “drive for self-perfection”; Henry Jr., secretary of the treasury under Franklin Roosevelt; and finally eminent lawyer Robert, who died in 2019. Lazarus’ many financial failings and mental instability proved to be burdens on his family, most heavily on Henry, the middle of his seven sons. Hardworking and determined, Henry graduated from Columbia Law School and set up a law firm with friends. He proceeded to make a series of astute real estate investments—buying and flipping properties in Manhattan—and became one of the wealthiest men in Gilded Age America. Wealth bought him influence, as well. A supporter of Woodrow Wilson, he was appointed ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, where, Meier writes, he witnessed with alarm the Armenian massacre, “mass murder on a scale the world had never seen.” Henry’s only son was unlike his father. Probably dyslexic, he struggled in school. “Burdened by an indecisive nature and weak self-esteem, he desperately wanted to prove himself,” which he did, amply, in his service to FDR. For 30 years, the New York Times noted at his death, “Mr. Morgenthau was Mr. Roosevelt’s confidant, cranky conscience, intensely loyal colleague, and unabashed, but occasionally outraged, admirer.” Robert, appointed by John F. Kennedy as the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, became “the most powerful federal prosecutor in New York City.” Meier recounts his challenges, losses, and successes as he worked to “redraw the boundaries of power in New York” during a career “without precedent in the history of American law enforcement.”
A majestic, authoritative multigenerational saga.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6885-2
Page Count: 1072
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A top-notch political memoir and serious exercise in practical politics for every reader.
In the first volume of his presidential memoir, Obama recounts the hard path to the White House.
In this long, often surprisingly candid narrative, Obama depicts a callow youth spent playing basketball and “getting loaded,” his early reading of difficult authors serving as a way to impress coed classmates. (“As a strategy for picking up girls, my pseudo-intellectualism proved mostly worthless,” he admits.) Yet seriousness did come to him in time and, with it, the conviction that America could live up to its stated aspirations. His early political role as an Illinois state senator, itself an unlikely victory, was not big enough to contain Obama’s early ambition, nor was his term as U.S. Senator. Only the presidency would do, a path he painstakingly carved out, vote by vote and speech by careful speech. As he writes, “By nature I’m a deliberate speaker, which, by the standards of presidential candidates, helped keep my gaffe quotient relatively low.” The author speaks freely about the many obstacles of the race—not just the question of race and racism itself, but also the rise, with “potent disruptor” Sarah Palin, of a know-nothingism that would manifest itself in an obdurate, ideologically driven Republican legislature. Not to mention the meddlings of Donald Trump, who turns up in this volume for his idiotic “birther” campaign while simultaneously fishing for a contract to build “a beautiful ballroom” on the White House lawn. A born moderate, Obama allows that he might not have been ideological enough in the face of Mitch McConnell, whose primary concern was then “clawing [his] way back to power.” Indeed, one of the most compelling aspects of the book, as smoothly written as his previous books, is Obama’s cleareyed scene-setting for how the political landscape would become so fractured—surely a topic he’ll expand on in the next volume.
A top-notch political memoir and serious exercise in practical politics for every reader.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6316-9
Page Count: 768
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
Less a sequel than an addendum, the book offers a close-up view of the Oval Office in its darkest hour.
Four decades after Watergate shook America, journalist Woodward (The Price of Politics, 2012, etc.) returns to the scandal to profile Alexander Butterfield, the Richard Nixon aide who revealed the existence of the Oval Office tapes and effectively toppled the presidency.
Of all the candidates to work in the White House, Butterfield was a bizarre choice. He was an Air Force colonel and wanted to serve in Vietnam. By happenstance, his colleague H.R. Haldeman helped Butterfield land a job in the Nixon administration. For three years, Butterfield worked closely with the president, taking on high-level tasks and even supervising the installation of Nixon’s infamous recording system. The writing here is pure Woodward: a visual, dialogue-heavy, blow-by-blow account of Butterfield’s tenure. The author uses his long interviews with Butterfield to re-create detailed scenes, which reveal the petty power plays of America’s most powerful men. Yet the book is a surprisingly funny read. Butterfield is passive, sensitive, and dutiful, the very opposite of Nixon, who lets loose a constant stream of curses, insults, and nonsensical bluster. Years later, Butterfield seems conflicted about his role in such an eccentric presidency. “I’m not trying to be a Boy Scout and tell you I did it because it was the right thing to do,” Butterfield concedes. It is curious to see Woodward revisit an affair that now feels distantly historical, but the author does his best to make the story feel urgent and suspenseful. When Butterfield admitted to the Senate Select Committee that he knew about the listening devices, he felt its significance. “It seemed to Butterfield there was absolute silence and no one moved,” writes Woodward. “They were still and quiet as if they were witnessing a hinge of history slowly swinging open….It was as if a bare 10,000 volt cable was running through the room, and suddenly everyone touched it at once.”
Less a sequel than an addendum, the book offers a close-up view of the Oval Office in its darkest hour.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5011-1644-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2015
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