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
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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