A readable history of a man who tried to do his best, handicapped by the subject's limits and the author's ulterior motives.
In an effort to bring to Grover Cleveland the public acclaim he has not had since the 19th century, popular historian and crime novelist Jeffers (Who Killed Precious?, 1991, etc.) tells the story of this honest, decent, and somewhat boring Chief Executive.
The only US president to serve two non-consecutive terms and to marry during his tenure, Cleveland was known in his day for his forthright honesty and determined integrity. From his stints as veto-happy mayor of Buffalo, corruption-fighting governor of New York, and reform-minded president, Cleveland emerges as an ethical man who followed his convictions despite the corrupt enticements of the Gilded Age. Jeffers's biography moves briskly along, but the occasionally turgid prose creates a few stumbling blocks. Also, it seems at times that the author has not fully assimilated his research: at one point Cleveland's father is described as a “brilliant student” at Yale; later, Jeffers states that the senior Cleveland was considered “studious but not brilliant.” The incessant praise of Cleveland often reaches fulsome levels; Grover is lauded for publicly confessing that he fathered an illegitimate child, yet Jeffers never criticizes his hero for tucking the boy away into an orphanage when his mother was confined to a mental asylum. An Honest President opens and closes with attacks on Bill Clinton for his sexual peccadilloes, and by the end of the biography readers may wonder if the author’s primary objective is to lambaste Clinton by comparing him to this supposedly sterling presidential figure. In the end, Jeffers fails to significantly improve Cleveland's image, because his text adequately reflects an honest yet uninspiring politician.
A readable history of a man who tried to do his best, handicapped by the subject's limits and the author's ulterior motives.Pub Date: July 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-380-97746-X
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
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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