Highlights of the New Jersey Democratic senator and former professional athlete's life, thoughts, and accomplishments. An earlier memoir, Life on the Run (1976), described Bradley's experiences as a Princeton All-American and professional basketball player, and set the stage for his 1978 transition from athletics to the US Senate. This second memoir is a complex interweaving of memories, experiences, legislative accomplishments, and ruminations, leading to another transformation in Bradley's life: his decision not to run for re-election in 1996. This unusual memoir includes statements of policy on such matters as race, economic justice, the environment, campaign financing, tax reform, labor-management relations, and the role of government. Bradley justifies the inclusion of such disparate material by pulling everything into the context of his life: describing, for example, how his experiences playing with black basketball players shaped his commitment to racial equality and how his political principles stem from the sense of ethics and fair play with which he was raised. Bradley goes into almost numbing detail in describing legislation he has sponsored and gives too little space to intense controversies in his career, such as his support for Reagan administration policies in Nicaragua. In addition, cynics might charge that he has laid the groundwork for a future presidential bid by offering platform-like positions on such matters as welfare reform, abortion, and criminal justice, and advocating a ``third way'' that claims to reject the failed policies of both conservatives and liberals. But there are many more reasons to be impressed than critical of this memoir (every word of which Bradley apparently wrote himself). Bradley reveals how a politician operates and that's makes this book interesting. What makes it memorable is the way it reveals how political office can be a constant learning experience for a thoughtful politician. However limited that category of officeholders may be, this memoir proves that it includes Bill Bradley. (First printing of 100,000; Book-of-the-Month Club selection; author tour)
Pub Date: Jan. 24, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-44488-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1995
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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