An unrelenting critique of the bogeyman of liberals who refuses to go away.
The longtime critic of the Bush family levels his guns at today’s most notorious political consultant.
Just in time for the 2012 election, along comes Vanity Fair contributing editor Unger (The Fall of the House of Bush: The Untold Story of How a Band of True Believers Seized the Executive Branch, Started the Iraq War, and Still Imperils America Today, 2007, etc.) to remind liberals that Karl Rove did not depart the scene with his patron, the reviled W. The “Evil Genius” has been very busy attending to his long-term project of capturing all three branches of government for the Republican Party. From prestigious perches at Fox News, the Wall Street Journal and Newsweek, Rove has been preparing the public battle space for the coming election. Behind the scenes, contemptuous of the amateurish tea party and circumventing the ossified GOP apparatus, he’s strung together his own SuperPAC network. He has taken full advantage of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, and he’s seeded the Romney campaign with any number of close associates and acolytes. If Romney prevails with the help of Rove’s hidden hand, Unger insists, the consequences for the nation promise to be “monumental,” none of them good. To support his ominous prediction, he marches through Rove’s career scandals, none of which bear the hard-nosed operative’s fingerprints—he’s too smart for that—but they all reek of the master manipulator’s sulphurous odor. Unger discusses Rove’s role in the outing of Valerie Plame, his effort to manipulate Ohio’s 2004 election results and his use of the criminal justice system to target political opponents, along with his part in the Swift Boat ads that drowned John Kerry and his orchestration of the takedown that ended Dan Rather’s career. For the conscienceless Rove, issues—tort reform, voter fraud—matter only insofar as they advance the Republican cause. But, then, power has always been his objective, a 30-year effort “to game the American electoral system by whatever means necessary.”
An unrelenting critique of the bogeyman of liberals who refuses to go away.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-9493-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2012
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
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
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