If you wonder why Jimmy Carter was so unsuccessful as a president and outstanding as an ex-president, this book is for you. Carter’s reaction to the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) captures the essence of the Carter enigma. Promoting a technically impossible “Star Wars” scheme, Carter believed, was dishonest. Yet as historian Brinkley (Univ. of New Orleans; Dean Acheson, 1992) points out, Carter’s public condemnation of SDI reveals not only moral conviction, but also an utter inability to consider that the Reagan administration was simply using SDI to pressure the Soviets. As president, Carter was a man of moral absolutes in a world colored in shades of gray. As an ex-president, however, this same quality leaves him undeterred by concerns that prevent public officials from moving forward. To gain peace Carter will sit down with terrorists; tunnel vision can be instrumental when it is the ultimate goal that matters. The moralistic Carter has “turned the establishment of personal rapport with political outlaws into a diplomatic art form,” and the world is better off as a result. Brinkley is a sympathetic biographer, but Carter’s less admirable traits—unrelenting competitiveness, an occasional mean streak, and the oft-noted self-righteousness—are recognized along with the qualities Brinkley admires. Be forewarned, however: Brinkley is also an encyclopedic biographer. This volume reflects a decision to interrupt work on a complete biography of Carter to write a “short book” on Carter’s post-presidency. That this “short book” runs 500 pages reflects Brinkley’s emphasis on comprehensiveness, resulting in a sometimes tedious “first he did this, then he did that” tone that makes the work less lively than it should be. But there are also delightful vignettes, such as Brinkley’s discussion of the origins of Habitat for Humanity, that make persevering to the end worthwhile. Carter’s post-presidency appears not as an “unfinished” presidency, but rather as the continuation of work that was always about more, for Carter, than being president. (16 pages photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: May 11, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88006-X
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1998
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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