Ronald Reagan's friend, confidant, and attorney general offers a lively and absorbing apologia for his old boss and his Administration. Many remember President Reagan as an amiable but disengaged man, uninterested and uninvolved in the details of governance, and view the Reagan era as a period of unredeemed promise—noting, e.g., that despite candidate Reagan's promises in 1980, today the federal bureaucracy is larger than ever and massive deficits threaten to paralyze the economy. Not so, says Meese. Instead, Reagan was a strong and decisive leader, and the Reagan years were a time of great achievement. Meese attributes the economic boom of the 1980's to the tax reform of the early Reagan years and argues that the Reagan Administration's assertion of American authority and influence in the world resulted in positive foreign-policy developments such as the collapse of Communism and the curtailing of Libyan terrorism. Meese also defends Reagan against charges that his budgetary proposals led to the expansion of federal budget deficits (entrenched federal bureaucracies and special interests, built-in spending increases in the budget, and ideological traitors like David Stockman were the real culprits, Meese explains). The author portrays Reagan as a decisive and intelligent leader, in contrast with the image of the President that often emerged in the press. Although readers may be skeptical of some of Meese's assertions (e.g., in regard to the Iran-contra affair, that ``the conduct of the White House in carrying out the Iranian initiative was legal every step of the way''), Meese persuasively argues that Reagan attained many of his objectives and helped to effect pervasive changes in American domestic and foreign affairs. Meese also offers historically valuable, and tantalizing, insights into the internal workings of the Reagan Administration and the Machiavellian world of Washington politics. A brisk and engrossing—if decidedly biased—memoir.
Pub Date: June 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-89526-522-2
Page Count: 395
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1992
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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