Good for newcomers seeking insight into contemporary foreign policy.
Journalistic account of Condoleezza Rice’s tenure as Secretary of State from a veteran reporter who covered it for the Washington Post.
Although Rice is the focal point, this is really a history of the last three years in international affairs. Kessler delivers fly-on-the-wall coverage as the most powerful woman in the world travels the earth attempting to cool off global hotspots. His chatty chapter titles (“Rebirth in Paris,” “Passage to New Delhi,” Blowup Over Beirut”) belie a deeply reported analysis. Kessler paints Rice as a smart, sophisticated diplomat stuck between a bellicose administration and an increasingly restless global community. After 9/11, this scholar of Soviet Russia trained in the realist school of foreign policy suddenly adopted her president’s messianic worldview, favoring the promotion of democracy at the expense of all else. Her handlers try to position Rice for an eventual White House run, but Kessler argues that her tenure as Secretary has left the country in a far worse position than she found it. She failed, he argues, to articulate a serious vision for the future and is undercut by elements in the administration, such as Cheney and Rumsfeld, who favor a more isolationist approach. The book doesn’t cover very much new ground, instead providing an in-depth look at how decisions of world-historical importance get made. Those looking for gossipy speculation about what motivates the unmarried Rice, a child of Southern segregation turned Stanford provost, will be disappointed. Readers curious about what really happens when she sits across from her counterparts in Riyadh, Khartoum and Baghdad will find this up-the-minute account revealing.
Good for newcomers seeking insight into contemporary foreign policy.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-312-36380-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
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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