An incisive illustration of the often underrated role a leader’s personality plays in shaping world events.
How Ronald Reagan confounded critics and baffled even his supporters to help end the Cold War.
Admirers of the 40th president credit his “evil empire” rhetoric and his military build-up for backing the Soviet Union into an inescapable corner; critics describe him as a merely passive observer who happened to hold office while the Soviet system imploded. Los Angeles Times foreign correspondent Mann (The China Fantasy, 2007, etc.) focuses on what was uniquely Reagan about the ending of the Cold War, a task complicated by the president’s opacity, even to those who knew him best. The author masterfully traces the nearly parallel career of Richard Nixon, the only cold warrior whose anticommunist credentials rivaled Reagan’s and who cemented a balance of power relationship with the Soviet Union, continued under Ford and Carter. On the campaign trail, Reagan roundly criticized detente. Viewing the Cold War as a struggle of ideas and economic systems, he sought not merely to accommodate the Soviet system but to change it. During his second term, abetted by the unlikely Suzanne Massie, an author who tutored him on the Russian “soul,” Reagan understood that Gorbachev was a new kind of Russian leader, one who understood the degree to which the communist system had ossified. Through diplomatic channels both formal and informal, and with a seemingly unerring sense of when to apply pressure and when to ease up, Reagan matched Gorbachev move for move, as both leaders deflected relentless criticism from hardliners within their own countries. Mann enlivens his account with telling anecdotes—Gorbachev’s impatience with Reagan’s incessant joking, Reagan’s erroneous suspicion that Gorbachev might secretly believe in God—and with a brilliant exposition of the tug of war within the administration over Reagan’s famous Berlin Wall speech.
An incisive illustration of the often underrated role a leader’s personality plays in shaping world events.Pub Date: March 9, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-670-02054-6
Page Count: 482
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2008
Wingo rather frothily admits that, like ``all good sea stories,'' her reminiscence of her stint in the WAVES has been ``embellished.'' Now a retired teacher and a Santa Monica community activist, Wingo remembers feeling like Joan of Arc at her enlistment in the WAVES (Women Appointed for Voluntary Emergency Service) in 1944 at the age of 20. An Irish Catholic raised in Detroit, she attends boot camp at Hunter College in the Bronx, where the ``barracks'' are a five-story apartment building. Recruits are called Ripples (``Little Waves, silly''), and Wingo says that ``boot camp is like a harder Girl Scout camp'' where you learn that a ``misbegotten granny knot could screw up the whole war.'' Her bunkmates (the characters are composites) include Coralee Tolliver, a chunky ``hillbilly'' whom she despises (though Wingo later serves as her maid of honor), and Barbara Lee Corman, who calls everyone ``honeychile'' and juggles five ``fian-says.'' The trio gets assigned to the Great Lakes Naval Station in Chicago where they train on guns. Following a Navy Day parade in which Wingo, in full dress, rides astraddle a torpedo, she and her buddies are shipped out to Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay to train the men in the Armed Guard for at-sea duty while they, as women, will remain ashore. Wingo falls for a tattooed sailor named Blackie (he calls her ``Toots'') until he admits he visits prostitutes because it ``saves the nice girls for when we want to marry them.'' She describes a chaotic V-J Day celebration and a whirlwind tour of New York City; and she offers an entire chapter about getting drunk and sick aboard a Russian ship anchored in San Francisco Bay. Jocular and occasionally appealing, this suffers from an almost complete lack of hard information or historical perspective on the very real contributions of the WAVES.
Pub Date: Nov. 11, 1994
ISBN: 1-55750-924-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Naval Institute Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994
The annual Halloween Parade in New York City's Greenwich Village might be the closest thing to Carnival north of New Orleans. It's a wild rumpus, where inhibitions flee and true selves come out of the closet. In the Village, traditional Halloween ghoulishness mixes with drag-queen fabulousness and quite a bit of rough-trade leather and exposed (often pierced) body parts. Anthropologist Kugelmass (From a Ruined Garden, 1983) calls it ``a metaphor for the peculiar combination of chaos and creativity that characterizes daily life in New York City.'' Kugelmass has combined interviews of participants and spectators with full-color photographs of the parade taken by Mariette Pathy Allen, Elijah Cobb, Harold Davis, Lauren Piperno, and Marilyn Stern. The photos, all taken at night, capture the pagan abandon of the parade.
Pub Date: Oct. 31, 1994
ISBN: 0-231-08400-5
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994
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