Fascinating to dip into casually and essential to students of the Kennedy administration, the Cold War, and...
Three months, 1,700 pages. But what months they were: a season in the midterm administration of John F. Kennedy marked by faltering polls, the aftermath of near nuclear war, and one crisis after another.
Yes, JFK secretly taped conversations in the White House, just like Nixon—and Johnson, Eisenhower, Truman, and Roosevelt. Nixon’s problem was refusing to acknowledge that his tapes existed. Kennedy, write the editors of this exhaustive set of transcripts, most probably taped in order to preserve moments for his post–White House memoir, and they “find no evidence that he taped only self-flattering moments.” Indeed, the tapes find the president wondering whether he’d been responsible for the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, the immediate results of which occupy him and his advisers in the first 1,000 pages of this collection, housed at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center. The present set of volumes opens the day after the crisis, “the world’s closest brush with global thermonuclear war,” ended; it closes with Kennedy still preoccupied with the cat and mouse of dealing with Fidel Castro and Nikita Khrushchev even as other leaders—from France’s Charles de Gaulle to emboldened Congressional Republicans at home—jockeyed to take advantage of changes in global realpolitik. One of those changes was a perceptible rise in American military readiness: as the editors note, on Nov. 4, the Strategic Air Command reached the peak of its force, such that “if the President ordered retaliatory strikes against the Soviet Union on this day, 1,749 nuclear bombers and 182 ballistic nuclear missiles were ready.” Even so, the collection sees Kennedy and aides such as Dean Rusk and Robert McNamara resisting the military’s demands for more funding and new weapons. For instance, said Kennedy to his chief military adviser of a submarine-mounted missile, “I don’t see quite why we’re building as many as we’re building.”
Fascinating to dip into casually and essential to students of the Kennedy administration, the Cold War, and late-20th-century world history.Pub Date: Feb. 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-393-08124-4
Page Count: 1728
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 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
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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