A professed liberal’s assessment of the rise, reign and enduring legacy of William F. Buckley (1925–2008), the godfather of the modern conservative movement.
Bogus (Law/Roger Williams Univ.; Why Lawsuits are Good for America: Disciplined Democracy, Big Business, and the Common Law, 2001, etc.) offers not a traditional cradle-to-grave biography but an ongoing conversation about and argument with Buckley—with long (often overlong) asides explaining the historical contexts of events involving his subject. The author admires Buckley as profoundly as he disagrees with him. He praises him throughout for his humor, prolificacy, energy, writing, debating and managerial skills and devotion to his family and causes. But for Buckley’s principal ideas, which, Bogus writes repeatedly, came directly from his father, he has much disagreement and even disdain. Nonetheless, he recognizes that Buckley changed American history, “a feat so great that it is almost impossible to overstate.” Bogus writes about Buckley’s influence on Ronald Reagan, Karl Rove, Rush Limbaugh and numerous others, and he shows how Buckley assembled a team that propelled National Review into a position of influence. The author revisits Buckley’s father’s involvement in the Mexican Revolution (he met Pancho Villa), swiftly summarizes Buckley’s education, his early writings and his efforts to avoid combat in World War II and Korea. He establishes the primacy of religion in Buckley’s weltanschauung and chronicles his awkward, tone-deaf writing about civil rights, his symbolic run for mayor of New York, his advocacy of wars in Vietnam and elsewhere and his moves to distance NR from the Birchers and other extremists. A disagreeing but rarely disagreeable argument with a figure far easier to debate on the page than in person.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-59691-580-0
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2011
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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