Biographer and financial expert Grant (Mr. Market Miscalculates: The Bubble Years and Beyond, 2008, etc.) takes the measure of “Czar” Reed, the Gilded Age giant of the Congress.
The great John Singer Sargent painted him; the peerless Augustus Saint-Gaudens sculpted him. Both felt obliged to apologize for not quite capturing the essence of Thomas Brackett Reed (1839–1902), the powerful House Speaker. Of the Sargent portrait, the inveterately sardonic Reed remarked: “I hope my enemies are satisfied.” Where artistic geniuses before him have faltered, it seems churlish to censure Grant for failing to give us the man in full, particularly as he writes with great verve about the political issues that dominated Reed’s era. The author effectively demystifies economic arcana—protective tariff, gold standard, bimetallism, etc.—to breezily instruct readers in the intra-Congress, parliamentary maneuvering and mastery of the rules for which the Speaker is best remembered, even to account for Reed’s unlikely late-life apostasy on issues like women’s suffrage and imperialism. Solving the private Reed, though, poses a difficult problem for Grant—indeed, for any biographer looking to pierce the legendary imperiousness that both attracted and repelled colleagues and constituents. Reed’s massive frame, opaque gaze, formidable intellect and lacerating wit kept contemporaries at arm’s length. He was respected, even feared, but never loved. Notwithstanding his fiercely partisan party service, fellow Republicans preferred the likes of the charismatic and thoroughly dishonest James G. Blaine or the amiable, relentlessly ordinary William McKinley for the presidency. Incorruptible in an era notorious for corruption, Reed, nevertheless, was no earnest reformer in the mode of, say, Democrat Grover Cleveland. He was a fatalist about the business cycle and about mankind, and had “no interest in instructing the impure.” He loathed humbug and grandiloquence, severe handicaps for a politician. Asked in 1896 about his chances for the presidential nomination, Reed responded, “They could do worse—and probably will.”
Flawed, yes, but likely to become the standard biography, at least for now.
Pub Date: May 10, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4165-4493-7
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2011
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
