A diatribe in black and white that will leave many yearning for a shade of gray.
Teddy Roosevelt is beaten to a pulp with his own big stick.
A senior fellow at the Cato Institute, revisionist historian Powell (FDR’s Folly, Wilson’s War, 2005) conducts an all-out assault on the presidential record of Theodore Roosevelt, who may have charmed other writers but wins not a single plaudit here. Powell indicts Roosevelt as a man who vastly expanded executive power; interfered “recklessly” in the lives of Americans and the affairs of other countries; and left a legacy of big government and global interventionism that continues to this day. Turning each of Roosevelt’s most noted actions on its head, the author argues that Teddy did not bust trusts (but promoted monopolies); did not help purify food (but helped special interests); and, most egregiously, did not advance American conservation (but “degraded much of our natural environment” through ill-advised dam-building and forest policies). What’s more, Roosevelt’s “soak the rich” federal income tax has proven intrusive and burdensome for all. Even Roosevelt’s progressive cohorts do not escape Powell’s tireless bludgeoning: Muckraking journalists were melodramatic and wrongheaded in their attacks on big business, and Jacob Riis failed to realize how much better off the poor were than in the past. Readers who share Powell’s enthusiasm for limited government and free markets will doubtless enjoy this skewering of a widely admired president; others will be astonished to read that nothing about Teddy was as it seemed, that his stated good intentions always led to dark deeds and that, no matter how appealing his heroic and romantic manner, he deserves no place on the “best Presidents” list. “Contrary to what the many worshipful books about him would have us believe, Roosevelt has proved to be a scourge rather than a salvation,” the author writes.
A diatribe in black and white that will leave many yearning for a shade of gray.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-23722-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2006
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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