Good-natured, self-serving, with useful lessons for budding officeholders (hint: let someone powerful introduce you to your...
“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
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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