A great president, then, if with a few blemishes. Good reading for students of the office and the time.
George Washington: a so-so general, at least at the start; a capable politician, even if he didn’t particularly enjoy pressing the flesh.
But a great president? This slender volume in Arthur Schlesinger’s American Presidents series, by political historian Burns (Dead Center, 1999, etc.) and revolutionary-era historian Dunn (Sister Revolutions, 1999), hints that some of Washington’s renown in that department has to do only with his being the first in the job. Yet, they add, Washington did much in office to recast the role of the chief executive as the energetic center of government, to the discomfort of contemporaries who believed that therein lay the road to kingship; his model posited “vigorous executive leadership, a flexible and resourceful administration, presidential rather than party leadership—a model that overrode the checks and balances without blatantly violating the spirit of the Constitution but that threatened to pulverize the opposition.” Other presidents have followed Washington’s lead to a fault, raising “formidable threats of excessive presidential power, as in the cases of a Lyndon B. Johnson and a George W. Bush,” but his legacy has largely been modified by the evolution of a two-party system that requires a little more teamwork on the president’s part. Burns and Dunn capably chart the course of Washington’s presidency, examining what they consider to be his successes (including the reshaping of the constitutional balance of powers) and failures (among them the polarization wrought by the Jay Treaty, which “left much that was precious to Washington—national unity, the common good, his own reputation—in tatters”). In the end, they fault him only gently for occasional missteps in office, notably his failure to act to hasten the end of slavery.
A great president, then, if with a few blemishes. Good reading for students of the office and the time.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2004
ISBN: 0-8050-6936-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2003
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
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