A well-researched complement to McCullough’s somewhat more accessible life: of much interest to students of the early...
An agile life of Adams, “the unbeloved ‘president by three votes.’ ”
Historians have been paying greater attention to the hitherto-overlooked second president in the wake of David McCullough’s magisterial John Adams (2001) and the contested presidential election of 2000 (see David Ferling’s John Adams vs. Jefferson, 2004). Financial historian Grant (Money of the Mind, 1992, etc.) focuses on Adams as a politician and revolutionary, but also as an economic thinker and sometimes ambivalent philosopher. Raised a Puritan, for instance, Adams had no lack of work ethic yet was, at least in his youth, “dull, lazy, unobservant, and confused”; when he was supposed to be studying or working, Adams could often be found eating, smoking, “gallanting the girls” or drinking. On the last matter, Adams was especially of two minds; fond of a dram himself, he was unsure whether to campaign against the taverns of Braintree, Massachusetts. Marrying Abigail, with whom he had a tender and playful relationship, was a step in the right direction, and when it came time to draw up the Declaration of Independence, Adams was no stranger to hard work. Grant points out that Adams served on more than 30 congressional committees, was active in drafting American foreign policy, and was constantly on the run even while predicting that he would soon die from sheer exhaustion. Though most of his pages are devoted to events before 1781, Grant gives generous coverage to Adams’s post-revolutionary career, when, first, he became vice president and wrestled with the fundamental cheapness of a people that did not wish to be taxed and a Congress that did not want to spend, then became president—by a slender margin indeed—and faced with difficulties of establishing a secular, democratic government in a God-haunted nation that, even then, was beginning to crack apart under the weight of slavery.
A well-researched complement to McCullough’s somewhat more accessible life: of much interest to students of the early Republic and the revolutionary era.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-374-11314-9
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2004
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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