by Dan Bongino ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 12, 2016
A book that will appeal to readers convinced that Benghazi and Hillary Clinton’s email habits are the most pressing concerns...
A conservative polemic against “big government” disguised as a memoir of government service.
After serving in the Secret Service for more than 10 years, Bongino (Life Inside the Bubble: Why a Top Ranked Secret Service Agent Walked Away From It All, 2013) ran for the Senate in Maryland in 2011 and for Congress in 2014, both times unsuccessfully. As he writes, he “had resigned from the agency…to run in a deep blue state, as a Republican, against the sitting President’s policies.” The connotation is that Bongino’s inside-the-Beltway position revealed many disturbing secrets about policymaking and political access. Yet his discussion of his Secret Service career is mainly anecdotal, interspersed with assertions about his peers’ unparalleled abilities and teamwork. Otherwise, Bongino holds the federal government in contempt, particularly his former commander in chief: “President Obama and his hard-left allies will never understand ‘the code’ [of the Secret Service] because they will never understand ‘the team.’ ” This disdain for Obama drives much of the narrative. The author’s tactic is to introduce a particular buzzworthy scandal—e.g., the IRS’s targeting of conservative nonprofits, the purported Benghazi cover-up, the prisoner swap involving Bowe Bergdahl—and then follow up with overlong paragraphs that don’t move beyond insinuation. He thus insists these matters reveal “an administration where the sheer number of government scandals and abuses of power overwhelmed the institutional defense mechanisms.” In late chapters, Bongino focuses on perceived flaws of American electoral politics, with broad-canvas topics like “Why Blue States Matter.” His writing becomes more thoughtful when he looks past his obsession with Obama’s “collectivism,” but it remains studded with platitudes—e.g., “Americans never surrendered their homes and fortunes to the whims and wants of either bandits or bureaucrats.” Even the author’s more interesting political observations and anecdotes, such as advising conservatives to emulate progressive groups’ tactics while ignoring their messages, underline his fundamental cynicism.
A book that will appeal to readers convinced that Benghazi and Hillary Clinton’s email habits are the most pressing concerns Americans now face.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-08298-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 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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