A significant, brightly written American story.
An exhaustive biography of Edward M. House (1858-1938), the wealthy Texan who served as President Woodrow Wilson’s chief personal adviser and envoy to Europe in World War I.
Growing up in a prominent Houston family, House proved an indifferent student at Cornell, worked in the family business and then devoted his life to pursuing his fascination with the mechanics of politics. With keen insights into human behavior and a crafty knack at behind-the-scenes political infighting, he helped elect four governors of Texas, one of whom dubbed him with the honorific “Colonel House.” In 1911, he met Wilson, then governor of New Jersey, and together, they forged “one of the most famous friendships in American political history.” Neu (Emeritus, History/Brown Univ.; America's Lost War: Vietnam, 1945-1975, 2005, etc.), who set this massive project aside several times over the past four decades to publish other books, has used House’s diary and other papers to craft a remarkably vivid account of the political operator’s life; his critical unofficial role in U.S. diplomatic relations during the Great War; and his intimate relationship with Wilson as a supportive friend and adviser who correctly assessed the looming storm in Europe. For seven years, House was treated like a member of the White House family, carrying out interpersonal tasks Wilson found distasteful, meeting with European leaders and helping prepare the way for the war’s end. Neu’s engrossing narrative has such immediacy that readers share House’s hurt and disappointment when Wilson abruptly ended their close friendship. The break came after the president’s debilitating 1919 stroke, when Wilson’s second wife, Edith, who disliked House, seized his role. House was not invited to the president’s funeral. Neu deems House a “patient, crafty, and sometimes cynical” infighter and “a shrewd observer of human foibles,” widely admired but faulted by some at the height of his fame for developing an exaggerated sense of his own importance.
A significant, brightly written American story.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0195045505
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
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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