Students of modern history will take great interest in this work, which ably straddles the frontiers of the personal,...
One of 20th-century America’s most significant diplomats offers a window into his inner life and private concerns, fears and dreams.
With an eye to posterity, Kennan (1904–2005) assiduously kept a diary for nearly 90 years, compiling thousands of pages on everything from his impressions of Soviet leaders to notes on wave patterns in the North Atlantic. Costigliola (History/Univ. of Connecticut; Roosevelt's Lost Alliances: How Personal Politics Helped Start the Cold War, 2011, etc.) has selected the most representative and revealing passages for this dauntingly thick but eminently readable volume. In this age of ubiquitous social networking and oversharing, it seems remarkable that Kennan could write so much, about so many topics, without being dull or self-absorbed, but nearly every entry contains a perspicacious observation or insight. His dry wit is evident from the earliest years: At Princeton, he complained of an assigned book, “[i]t is really a great aid in the allopathic treatment I am taking this spring to cure my imaginative tendency, because it takes real assiduous mental concentration to dope a sentence out of it.” Displaying a tendency toward self-doubt that he hid in his confident public pronouncements and publications, Kennan’s diary entries evince an enduring belief that he could never quite live up to the goals he had set for himself. As early as 1959, he fretted that “[t]he Western world, at least, must today be populated in very great party [sic] by people like myself who have outlived their own intellectual and emotional environment.” Inexorably drawn again to Russia and endowed with an aesthetic and humanist imagination much broader than the State Department could contain, Kennan’s life’s work was, more than any political squabble, a searching for the “answer to the universal question of this wistful, waiting Russian countryside.”
Students of modern history will take great interest in this work, which ably straddles the frontiers of the personal, political and philosophical.Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-393-07327-0
Page Count: 736
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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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