One too many war stories, but fun for political junkies. (16 pp. photos, not seen)
After confessing that he has a “fetish for facts,” Senator Specter (R-Penn.) proceeds to dish up plenty of them in this hefty memoir.
As Specter tells it, the hallmark of his four decades in public service is a commitment to finding the truth regardless of the political consequences. In his view, “when people can agree on the facts and what is true, they can agree on what should be done in a just society.” While this sounds reasonable enough, the senator’s memoirs illustrate how elusive truth can be. Most of the issues he discusses in depth, ranging from the Supreme Court nominations of Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas to President Clinton’s impeachment, produced lots of facts but very little consensus on what was true. That reservation aside, Specter offers a great deal of information about his role in some of the more interesting investigations in recent history, beginning with the Kennedy assassination and ending with the impeachment. Inevitably, a memoir by a sitting politician will be somewhat self-serving. Certainly readers who disagree with Specter’s positions will tire of hearing about how ferreting out the truth and voting his conscience have allowed him to rise above the ranks of his venal colleagues. Also, the senator has a tendency to digress, sapping the story of its narrative momentum. In the middle of discussing Anita Hill, for instance, he lapses into an unrelated recollection about the 1988 presidential race. But most of us have learned to expect some wind when talking to a pol.
One too many war stories, but fun for political junkies. (16 pp. photos, not seen)Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-06-019849-4
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2000
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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