Thought-provoking from start to finish.
“No postwar politician did more to educate Americans to the primacy of image in politics” than Richard Nixon. So argues historian Greenberg in a rich work full of lessons and implications for spin doctors.
Richard Milhous Nixon lent himself to caricature throughout his long political career: famed for his five o’clock shadow at all hours of the day, for his sweaty brow, for his ski nose, he paid the mortgages for countless editorial cartoonists. This was not the legacy he sought, though Nixon was long aware of the need for a modern president to convey a memorable image at all times; in fact, Nixon reflected in one of his many memoirs, “In the modern presidency, concern for image must rank with concern for substance.” But Nixon, Greenberg argues, indeed authored that legacy and more: he gave us our current common-man image of the president, whether believable or not in his case, which did much for the rise of conservative populism; and in countless other ways he “nourished a culture in which the traffic in imagery was a constant and overriding concern.” Greenberg gets down to quite specific cases: he demonstrates, for instance, that Nixon carefully arranged for the famed May 1972 summit on strategic-arms limitations to be held in Moscow not to achieve greater public support for detente, but instead, as Charles Colson put it, “to strengthen the president’s image as one of the great world leaders of the century”; he constantly shifted political stances and alliances to keep what he imagined to be the most voter-friendly image before the public view, such that today no one can quite agree whether he was a conservative or a liberal; and in the final days, he even conspired to lock reporters in the White House press room so that he could have a moment away from the cameras he had always courted, “unmolested and unobserved.”
Thought-provoking from start to finish.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-393-04896-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2003
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 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
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