A two-volume safari into the paths of America's intellectual evolution, one which cuts some whackingly good, and not-so-good, swaths from the Colonial wilderness to the New Frontier. Most of the essayists are connected in one way or another with Harvard, Columbia and the White House; thus the book as a whole has what one of the editors calls "coherence and correspondence"; what that amounts to in point of fact and in point of view is a sort of socio-cultural rundown of the liberal democrats — or that set of references and preferences generally shared by members of the Kennedy Administration. Such a critical consensus is, of course, not bad at all, (though one might have suggested Louis Hacker as a fitter interpreter of "laissez-faire" than Max Lerner, and certainly Dwight MacDonald could have given a more unsettling account of "mass culture" than the one we get from Daniel Bell-but that's neither here nor there). What really bothers this reader is how much of the ground covered- politics, law, literature, economics, science, philosophy, religion, history- seems always to be just getting into the underbrush when the exploration stops and off we go on another jaunt, another essay. Among the real hunters; Seymour Harris' grapplings with Keynesianism, Kazin on the Realistic Novel, White on Pragmatism; among the touch-and-go group: Schlesinger's New Deal survey, Shils on Sociology, McGeorge Bundy on Internationalism. Still, a revealing, rewarding good general guide.
Pub Date: Sept. 17, 1963
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 22, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1963
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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