Fine cultural history, especially welcome in a time when the L-word is a pejorative.
A capable evocation of an American brahminate: the eminent liberal intelligentsia that led Ivy League schools and major cities through tough times—and that led America into Vietnam.
The principal players in former Yale history lecturer Kabaservice’s drama are gone: Cyrus Vance died in 2002 at the age of 84, having served several Democratic presidents and other elected officials, including his friend John Lindsay, who “appointed Vance to the four-member Knapp Commission to look into police corruption; the investigation presented a major headache for the mayor as the commission turned up evidence of widespread police graft and inaction on the part of City Hall.” Lindsay died two years earlier, having seen New York through some of its hardest years; his successor, Ed Koch, “particularly enjoyed scapegoating the patrician ex-mayor,” laying the blame for the city’s woes at Lindsay’s door. McGeorge Bundy, the architect of much Johnson administration Vietnam policy, died in 1996, disgraced; his friend Elliot Richardson died in 1999, similarly fallen from grace. All outlived their great friend Kingman Brewster, the visionary president of Yale, who took the university into the coed age and gave Richard Nixon fits by espousing a variety of left-of-center causes. Indeed, Kabaservice notes, Supreme Court chief justice Warren Burger considered a statement Brewster made that questioned whether black revolutionaries could “achieve a fair trial anywhere in the United States” to be the most seditious thing he had heard uttered in his lifetime. This constellation, writes Kabaservice, formed the heart of American liberalism, a cause that made considerable headway in the early Cold War era but then gave way before the radicalism of the New Left and the resurgence of the Old Right. Their failure to speak to the “broad American middle, whether defined in terms of class or of outlook,” made liberalism irrelevant and paved the way for Reaganism and Bushism.
Fine cultural history, especially welcome in a time when the L-word is a pejorative.Pub Date: April 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-8050-6762-0
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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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