by David O. Stewart ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 12, 2009
A riveting look at one of American history’s most dismal episodes.
By the winter of 1868 congressional Republicans, enraged by Andrew Johnson’s systematic attempts to thwart Reconstruction, believed they’d finally caught Lincoln’s accidental successor in the “crime” necessary to remove him from office. The irascible and politically maladroit president—memories of his drunken vice-presidential inauguration were still fresh—had fired Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, thereby violating the Tenure of Office Act. The ensuing impeachment spectacle qualifies as the last battle of the Civil War and the first act of the tawdry Gilded Age. A practicing attorney who has defended a federal judge against impeachment, Stewart (The Summer of 1787: The Men Who Invented the Constitution, 2007) demonstrates his legal acumen, explaining the constitutional bases for impeachment and teasing out “the tenacious opacity of the phrase ‘high crimes and misdemeanors.’ ” He also critiques the strategies of the House managers and the president’s defenders and explains the evidentiary squabbles resolved by presiding Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase. Also an adept historian, Stewart stresses the political nature of impeachment, where developments and outcome depend as much on events and the character and convictions of the protagonists. The author also profiles Benjamin Butler, the prosecution’s headstrong manager, the surprisingly slippery president-in-waiting, Ulysses S. Grant, and Edmund G. Ross, whose deciding vote against impeachment was likely purchased. Ross falls shockingly short of the profile in courage John F. Kennedy sketched, but the senator was only a small part of the gambling, bargaining, payoffs and bribes surrounding the trial. Stewart vibrantly renders these atmospherics, the poisonous politics, the personal animosities and the unbridled corruption that will leave readers rooting for both sides to lose.
Likely to become the standard version of this historic clash between a president and Congress.Pub Date: May 12, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-4749-5
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2009
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Ibram X. Kendi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 13, 2019
Title notwithstanding, this latest from the National Book Award–winning author is no guidebook to getting woke.
In fact, the word “woke” appears nowhere within its pages. Rather, it is a combination memoir and extension of Atlantic columnist Kendi’s towering Stamped From the Beginning (2016) that leads readers through a taxonomy of racist thought to anti-racist action. Never wavering from the thesis introduced in his previous book, that “racism is a powerful collection of racist policies that lead to racial inequity and are substantiated by racist ideas,” the author posits a seemingly simple binary: “Antiracism is a powerful collection of antiracist policies that lead to racial equity and are substantiated by antiracist ideas.” The author, founding director of American University’s Antiracist Research and Policy Center, chronicles how he grew from a childhood steeped in black liberation Christianity to his doctoral studies, identifying and dispelling the layers of racist thought under which he had operated. “Internalized racism,” he writes, “is the real Black on Black Crime.” Kendi methodically examines racism through numerous lenses: power, biology, ethnicity, body, culture, and so forth, all the way to the intersectional constructs of gender racism and queer racism (the only section of the book that feels rushed). Each chapter examines one facet of racism, the authorial camera alternately zooming in on an episode from Kendi’s life that exemplifies it—e.g., as a teen, he wore light-colored contact lenses, wanting “to be Black but…not…to look Black”—and then panning to the history that informs it (the antebellum hierarchy that valued light skin over dark). The author then reframes those received ideas with inexorable logic: “Either racist policy or Black inferiority explains why White people are wealthier, healthier, and more powerful than Black people today.” If Kendi is justifiably hard on America, he’s just as hard on himself. When he began college, “anti-Black racist ideas covered my freshman eyes like my orange contacts.” This unsparing honesty helps readers, both white and people of color, navigate this difficult intellectual territory.
Not an easy read but an essential one.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-50928-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: April 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
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