In the elegiac spirit of A Thousand Days—and with access to the family papers—Schlesinger has mounted a massive attack on the Robert Kennedy conundrum (shy/aggressive, compassionate/ruthless) and, no less, on the Kennedy brothers' detractors. The themes, the interpretations, the stories are not new; but never have they been so assidously nailed down. RFK is described as an "overachiever" who tenaciously overcame his childhood handicaps to become a scrappy youth and, as manager of JFK's 1952 senatorial campaign, his father's fighting son. "In part it was an [Irish] imposture," Schlesinger writes. "The gentle self was never extinguished." Later exposure to human suffering strengthened the repressed "instinct of sympathy" and gave it "social direction." But it was not until his father's incapacitation and his brother's death that "the qualities he had so long subordinated in the interest of others. . . could rise freely to the surface. He could be himself at last." A reductive analysis, one may decide, given the complexity of the man who emerges in these 850 crowded pages which—if they accomplished nothing else—would reaffirm RFK's salient role as a doer. And indeed it is when Kennedy failed to act (e.g., to block the Martin Luther King wiretaps) or over-reacted (e.g., in pursuing Jimmy Hoffa, countering the steel price rise, supporting counterinsurgency in South Vietnam) that Schlesinger's defense is least convincing. (That the credo "If there was a problem, there had to be a solution" exacts a cost, he does not recognize.) But there is sufficient here to occupy a battery of historians, some of it openly anti-revisionist (e.g., a broad defense of JFK's handling of the Cuban missile crisis), some of it startling (RFK ostensibly broke with LBJ after the latter' spoke of JFK's death as "divine retribution" for the Trujillo and Diem assassinations), some of it the scouring of old wounds (William Manchester, Gore Vidal), and much of it—especially apropos of RFK's extra-Justice Department activities—a considerable amplification of the record. Sentimental, rhetorical, partisan—and indispensable.
Pub Date: Sept. 5, 1978
ISBN: 0618219285
Page Count: 1092
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 22, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1978
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
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