Fehrman’s illuminating blend of presidential and publishing history with literary criticism will appeal to amateur...
A lively account of the literary achievements (and failures) of America’s presidents.
Though countless books have been published on nearly every presidential topic imaginable, journalist Fehrman (Home Grown: Cage the Elephant and the Making of a Modern Music Scene, 2013) has found one yet to be covered in-depth: the books that the presidents wrote. While George Washington wasn’t much of a writer, the tradition of the U.S. president’s donning his influential pen started early and has remained strong, with just a handful of exceptions. Nearly every POTUS has written—or had written for him—either a campaign book or a legacy book. The author provides both backstories and modern critiques of well-known books such as The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant and Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father as well as less familiar titles, including Calvin’s Coolidge’s surprisingly well-written autobiography. “As a writer and public speaker,” notes Fehrman, “Coolidge could be funny, imaginative, even rhetorically forceful when it served his ambitions.” Throughout, the author offers highly personal looks at the men who have occupied the White House: “Examining presidents as they write means examining them at their most human.” Consider, for instance, John F. Kennedy, who “craved literary fame” but “lacked the discipline to do literary work.” Beyond just presidential authorship, Ferhman also paints inspiring portraits of how our presidents consumed books, from Grant (“America’s first fiction-loving president”) to Theodore Roosevelt (“Reading, to him, was living”) to Harry Truman, who “read a stunning number of books.” The author goes even further, providing insight on the general history of reading and publishing in America. Overall, the author covers a great deal of ground that even major biographers have skipped over in favor of “sexier” storylines, yet to the book lover, these stories will be unquestionably enticing. Even the footnotes, appendix, and sources offer bookish gems.
Fehrman’s illuminating blend of presidential and publishing history with literary criticism will appeal to amateur historians and bibliophiles alike.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4767-8639-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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