Even allowing for a little politicking, this is one of the better books on Nixon in the recent crop, worth reading alongside...
A sympathetic—unusually so—portrait of the disgraced president by accomplished biographer and historian Thomas (Ike's Bluff: President Eisenhower's Secret Battle to Save the World, 2012, etc.).
Richard Nixon is so often the villain that it’s sometimes surprising to be reminded of his real accomplishments, no matter how politically calculating or unwilling, from détente with the Soviet Union to the establishment of the environmental regulations current Republicans are trying to demolish. By the author’s account, Nixon “wanted to be upbeat, to be an optimist,” and some of his struggle can be seen in the Manichaean construct of that optimism versus the brooding darkness and essential solitariness that he embodied. Indeed, as Thomas’ biographical—and sometimes psychobiographical—study builds, it becomes ever more unlikely that Nixon, a loner in the constituency-pleasing game of politics, could ever have succeeded. Score one for Nixon, as Thomas awards him full points for dogged determination. And score sympathy points for Nixon’s ability to rise above constant rejection and native moroseness to get as much done as he did, from amassing a small fortune at playing cards to opening the gates of the Forbidden City. Even so, like H.W. Brands’ recent Reagan, Thomas’ account is by no means uncritical. Though even paranoiacs have enemies, Nixon specialized in being “ever alert to put-downs,” whether from the media or from those born into wealth and power. Though evenhanded throughout, Thomas sometimes risks being taken for one of the Pat Buchanan school of apologists: “The facts of Watergate, as they dribbled out, were bad enough, but an inflamed press corps did not stop at the facts”; “He was not paranoid; the press and the ‘Georgetown set’ really were out to get him.”
Even allowing for a little politicking, this is one of the better books on Nixon in the recent crop, worth reading alongside Rick Perlstein’s decidedly less sympathetic Nixonland (2008) and Tim Weiner’s One Man Against the World (2015).Pub Date: June 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9536-7
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: June 23, 2015
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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