An odd but endearing look at a president the nation is finally beginning to understand and appreciate.
A former speechwriter for George H.W. Bush pens a heartfelt appreciation of the president.
The last of the Greatest Generation to occupy the Oval Office, Bush was a genuine war hero, who by 1987 had to contend with “the wimp factor” as he ran for the White House. A Yale-educated East Coast patrician, he was also a Texas oilman who loved country music and pork rinds. Elected to two terms in the House, defeated in a Senate race and in the 1980 presidential primary, he was a politician, yes, but one whose most distinguished service came by appointment: envoy to China, CIA director, U.N. ambassador. His candidacy always posed genuine problems for an American electorate not quite sure what to make of him. Today, he’s our oldest, and polls say our most-respected, living ex-president, a product of an America barely remembered. In this highly impressionistic, idiosyncratic treatment of Bush, Smith (English/Univ. of Rochester; A Talk in the Park: Nine Decades of Baseball Tales from the Broadcast Booth, 2011, etc.) frequently adverts to that bygone era with passages about cultural markers—the Andy Griffith Show, the Pearl Harbor Arizona Memorial, the Polo Grounds—and characters—Bert Parks, Pat Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Glenn Ford, Ted Williams, Yogi Berra—all icons perfectly at home in the pages of the Saturday Evening Post, where the author worked. Smith mixes in a good deal of his own career in journalism, academia and politics, but he devotes the bulk of the narrative to Bush’s presidency and retirement when Smith helped to craft speeches for the oratorically challenged president. Little lyricism is attached to Bush’s rhetoric, but he had what Smith calls a “poetry of the heart.” Up close, the author observed the essential Bush, and in numerous vignettes, he depicts a man of courtesy, sound judgment, uncommon decency, and strict devotion to country, friends and family.
An odd but endearing look at a president the nation is finally beginning to understand and appreciate.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1612346854
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Potomac Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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