Crisp personal portraits of two leaders (and their wives) shaping the new world order.
Exploration of the deepening friendship between two contrasting Western leaders at a time of perilous Soviet brinkmanship.
A prolific British-American biographer who grew up in Washington, D.C., Sandford departs from his usual subjects from the world of arts and entertainment (Masters of Mystery: The Strange Friendship of Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini, 2011, etc.), providing a comparative portrait of two consummate politicians who helped mend the “special relationship” that had soured during the Suez Crisis. Harold Macmillan (1894-1986), a middle-class publisher’s son with a doting American mother, had acceded as British prime minister in the wake of Anthony Eden’s resignation in 1956 and had already been trying to mend fences with the frank President Dwight Eisenhower. With his election in 1960, President John Kennedy, more than two decades Macmillan’s junior, was just the brash, charming and intellectual personality to foil and complement his more formal counterpart’s “mandarin inscrutability.” Sandford delights in contrasting the two characters, ancient and modern, rendering engaging reading through the alarming crises that erupted during the course of Kennedy’s administration. Over numerous visits and increasingly warm communications between the “dear friends,” the two leaders had to work together to manage Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev’s blustery threats in Berlin and Cuba, where the United States’ highly secretive Bay of Pigs debacle of April 1961 had already chastened the American administration. While Kennedy did not confer with Macmillan before the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, he was “extraordinarily receptive to British counsel,” despite British criticism of Macmillan as “passive” and “supine.” Sandford has an effective sense of character development as the leaders moved from one embroilment to the next.
Crisp personal portraits of two leaders (and their wives) shaping the new world order.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61614-935-2
Page Count: 325
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 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
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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