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HENRY A. WALLACE

HIS SEARCH FOR A NEW WORLD ORDER

A historian and a psychologist argue that esoteric spiritual beliefs governed the career of the enigmatic populist/progressive, Henry A. Wallace. Wallace (18881965) left an uneasy legacy to American history. Intellectual apologist for the progressive movement, an important secretary of agriculture and then vice president under Roosevelt, and Progressive Party candidate for president in 1948, Wallace is thought of today, if at all, as a well-intentioned though discredited internationalist who advocated accommodation with Stalinist Russia. Here White (History/Univ. of Sydney; FDR and the Press, not reviewed) and Maze (The Meaning of Behaviour, not reviewed) probe Wallace's personal papers and correspondence, as well as a 5,000-page transcript of interviews with him recorded in the early 1950s, to find a complex man whose love of humanity, abstract and concealed beneath a deep aloofness, found its roots in a unique system of spiritual beliefs. Wallace, the authors point out, was by training an agricultural scientist whose pragmatism stood him in good stead in his stint as head of the Department of Agriculture, where he was one of the New Deal's most accomplished activists. Nonetheless, he was also mystically inclined and endlessly explored the nexus among science, religious mysticism, and the quest for world peace and enlightenment. His coded correspondence with Russian mystic Nicholas Roerich, who advocated the protection of world cultural institutions in wartime, resulted in American support for a quixotic expedition by Roerich to Mongolia that embarrassed FDR. Despite some solid accomplishments as vice president — achievement of closer relations with Latin America, for instance — exposure of Wallace's ``Guru letters'' to Roerich and other indiscretions, contributed to the decision to drop Wallace from the ticket in 1944. He made a final run for president as the candidate of the Progressive Party in 1948; his antiCold War stance effectively ended his career. A rare examination of the life, accomplishments, and intellectual roots of an extraordinary though neglected figure.

Pub Date: June 19, 1995

ISBN: 0-8078-2189-6

Page Count: 420

Publisher: Univ. of North Carolina

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1995

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

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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