This is the third volume in Schlesinger's study The Age of Roosevelt, and it continues the domestic history of the F.D.R. administration. It is a masterful and absorbing discussion of the ideological, economic and political life of the years 1933-1936, in relation to the aims and functions of the New Deal. The beginning of the New Deal found a people in despair- shaken, disillusioned, apathetic — a propitious moment for demagogues and rabble-rousers. Beating drums they came- Father Coughlin, Gerald K. Smith, Dr. Townsend Huey Long. All had panaceas for despair while need and want clouded the senses of the public. Some were swayed by the peculiar appeal of the fascist-inspired crackpots (still to be found today) and there was the adulation of Hitler and Mussolini by men such as Hearst who, like McCarthy in a later decade, spearheaded the anti-communist scares of the '30's. There was the consolidation of divers political thought, the delineation of the radicals and progressives, the intellectual discovery of communism and socialism; and, shaping the emergency legislation of the new American government, the experimental pragmatism of the New Deal. Here the character and quality of the men who drove the New Deal are incisively portrayed, and Schlesinger's interpretation of the facts is always logical, astute and psychologically sound. Seen in perspective the struggles and victories of this program seem gargantuan. And Schlesinger is one of our most sophisticated historians as he attempts again to interpret history in terms of the meaning and function of democracy. It is exciting material and particularly pertinent on the eve of the election to come.
Pub Date: Sept. 7, 1960
ISBN: 0618340874
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 22, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1960
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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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