Wry perspective on the eternal seriousness of casting one’s vote.
This saga of bootstrapping from an impoverished boyhood to the Arkansas governor’s mansion and a distinguished senatorial career could easily serve as a manual for the legislatively inclined.
But it is the author’s total candor, combined with his facility for humor spun out of rural America’s plain talk, that lifts this remembrance well above the ordinary. Bumpers’s prose is not quite as golden as his oratorical reputation might suggest, but it clearly defines and celebrates the influences (primarily his father) and random events (some tragic and touching) that shaped his initial raw ambition for the recognition and power that come with public office and, in time, sparked the political conscience that gives such a life its direction. After a drunk driver killed his parents in 1949, the 24-year-old ex-Marine Bumpers—not a combat veteran, he is careful to stress—finished law school and returned to his East Arkansas hometown of Charleston (pop. 841) to marry, hang out his shingle, and attempt with negligible success to simultaneously carry on his father’s retail hardware business. As a lawyer he was no self-anointed paragon, eagerly glomming onto his opponents’ shadowy courtroom tactics, pragmatically dodging divorce cases where violence-prone ex-husbands posed a tangible threat, but in 18 years of practice he lost only two cases heard by a jury. He was both liberal and influential in persuading racist Charleston to become the first municipality in the former Confederate states to integrate public schools following the 1954 Supreme Court decision mandating it. Bumpers went on to thwart segrationist Orval Faubus’s attempt at a comeback, becoming in 1970 the youngest Arkansas governor ever (age 44) and, two years later, the most bored and frustrated. A surprise win over J. William Fulbright in 1974 sent Bumpers to the US Senate for 24 years; he was called back, ex-officio, to dramatically conclude the defense for longtime friend and colleague Bill Clinton’s 1999 impeachment trial (full text included).
Wry perspective on the eternal seriousness of casting one’s vote.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-50521-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2002
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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