With the assistance of Henican (co-author, with Dwight Gooden: Doc, 2013, etc.), the former Republican governor of Florida explains why he is now a Democrat.
Echoing the words of Ronald Reagan, Crist told the 2012 Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, “I didn’t leave the Republican Party. It left me.” Many Republicans thought Crist’s betrayal began about four years earlier. At a rally in support of the new president’s economic stimulus package, Crist not only appeared on the same stage as Obama, but got a hug from him to boot. For Republicans, the embrace symbolized Crist’s defiance of current party wisdom that Obama was to be opposed at all costs. For Crist, this Republican “tribalism” was “silly—and wrong,” but his memoir gives evidence that he and his lifelong party had been diverging long before then. Crist was ashamed when the Florida fiasco of 2000 ended with the U.S. Supreme Court awarding the state’s electoral votes and the whole election to George W. Bush, who happened to be brother of then-Governor Jeb Bush. As governor himself six years later, he would upset his party when he pushed to make voting easier for all Floridians, even for former felons. Still calling himself “pro-life,” in practice, he has been loath to use his political offices to come between women and their doctors. As Florida attorney general in 2005, he steered clear of the Terri Schiavo case and was aghast when the Bushes and congressional Republicans tried to use the power of the state to force the comatose woman’s husband to keep her on life support. Democrats, of course, will eat up Crist’s self-presentation as common-sense populist, as well as his unflattering portraits of the Bushes, Karl Rove, Sarah Palin and many other GOP and tea party stars. Republicans will find little to cheer about here, but independent-minded readers might enjoy this front-row view of Florida politics at the turn of the millennium.
Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-525-95441-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
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
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