Her heart belongs to Daddy.
The life of the former president viewed through the eyes of his admiring and devoted daughter.
In her literary debut, the former First Daughter finds precious little evil to see, hear or speak—certainly not concerning anyone in her family. Her parents (and grandparents and all other progenitors, clear back to prehistory when the Bushes were still in the trees) were the best. Her brothers are awesome. The author can’t understand why so many in the press hate Republicans. And Democrats are dirty campaigners. Daddy was an outstanding student, a brilliant athlete. Respected and admired and loved by everyone who ever met him. (Lots of people—even Secret Service agents—cried when he left the White House.) John Dean was “an arrogant little creep.” The booming economy during the Clinton years was due to Daddy. So was the fall of the Soviet Union. Iran-Contra was “blown out of proportion.” Newsweek had no business putting that Daddy-is-a-wimp stuff on its cover. Peggy Noonan takes too much credit for Daddy’s speeches. Lee Atwater had no idea that Willie Horton was black. She quotes her father: “All this Anita Hill stuff was transparently phony, in my view.” And Daddy did know how a supermarket checkout scanner worked. Daddy’s heart was broken when a storm damaged the Kennebunkport home. Jeb Bush cried when he thought Gore had won Florida in 2000. Daddy cried when his son won the White House. Daddy and Bill Clinton are now pals, though Clinton’s amity is probably just a ploy to woo some GOP voters. Arnold Scaasi designed a cool salmon chiffon dress for her second wedding. The author shuffles into her daffy deck of history some stories about her own vicissitudes (divorce, re-marriage, travel on the Trans-Siberian Railroad—whose sad amenities she compares with those experienced “in the Siberian gulags”). And with all the testimonials to Daddy she reproduces here, the entire volume becomes a Festschrift, her father’s visage a huge smiley-face.
Her heart belongs to Daddy.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2006
ISBN: 0-446-57990-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
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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