“I love campaigning, honing the message and delivering it to the voters”: a political memoir of the sort that usually precedes a bid for the presidency—a possibility the present New Mexico governor surely keeps close to his heart.
Richardson is a new, and very well situated, kind of politico: bilingual and bicultural in a nation increasingly both those things, born to a Mexican mother and Anglo father, long resident in Mexico but with an East Coast education, a boomer who didn’t partake, let alone inhale, and who missed out on Vietnam but would have gone if asked. He is also a bold and very shrewd practical politician who isn’t bashful about unveiling an ultraliberal pedigree. It was Hubert Humphrey who sent him off to New Mexico to bag his first elected office; Bill Clinton who appointed him ambassador to the UN (during which service, among other things, Richardson won a surprising concession from none other than Saddam Hussein); and Al Gore who made noise about sharing the ticket with Richardson in 2004. That pedigree, proudly worn, will likely not earn Richardson points among wealthy, right-leaning Texans, but there’s enough pointed politicking in these pages to launch a write-in campaign right now, as Richardson pushes for the preservation of wild places here, talks tough on crime and international outlawry there, faintly praises the sitting president (“Kerry ran a good race. Bush ran a better one; people just liked the guy”) and gets in a few digs at members of his own party.
Good-natured, self-serving, with useful lessons for budding officeholders (hint: let someone powerful introduce you to your first big crowd). We’ll be hearing more from this author.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2005
ISBN: 0-399-15324-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2005
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | POLITICAL & ROYALTY
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The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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