Inspirational reading for young women seeking careers in politics or nongovernmental organizations, and instructive for...
A consistently captivating memoir by a woman of apparently endless accomplishment.
“I have lived a most interesting and productive professional life,” Brundtland writes at the outset. That’s an understatement, but consistent with her humble and often humorous approach to relating her meteoric rise. Born in Sweden to refugee resistance fighters and postwar socialist stalwarts, Brundtland took degrees in public health and medicine from Oxford and Harvard, returned home to Norway, and promptly became involved in the politics that seemed her birthright. (Describing a childhood spell in summer camp, for instance, she recalls regarding it as unjust that the boys there got to learn woodworking but were excluded from cooking classes, which, she posits, may help explain the inferiority of Scandinavian cuisine.) Appointed minister of the environment at 35, she undertook an ambitious program of reforms that earned her and her country high marks among ecologists, especially for the reduction of acid rain. Six years later, in 1981, she became Norway’s first female prime minister and one of the few women heading a state anywhere in the world. (About the most prominent of her peers, England’s Margaret Thatcher, she offers guarded but cordial words.) Brundtland’s memoir has its folksy and even gossipy moments—we learn that the German leader Willy Brandt’s wife was unhappy in her marriage—but in the main it is respectful and highly serious as she considers such matters as the “Nordic balance of power,” which undoubtedly helped contain Soviet expansionism in northern Europe, and the importance of the European Union in world affairs. Along the way, she unfolds a personal vision of feminism and political responsibility, explains the peculiarities of Norwegian society, and champions the work of the World Health Organization, of which she is currently the director-general.
Inspirational reading for young women seeking careers in politics or nongovernmental organizations, and instructive for policy wonks of every stripe.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-374-16716-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2002
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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