Certain to appeal to Clinton devotees, especially in light of the possibility of still further Bill Clinton endeavors as...
The post-presidential life of Bill Clinton.
In this admiring account, veteran journalist and National Memo editor-in-chief Conason (It Can Happen Here: Authoritarian Peril in the Age of Bush, 2007, etc.) traces the former president’s career from his 2001 departure from the White House—when he was $11 million in debt, vilified by “habitual haters,” and seeking some purpose—to his present role as head of the Clinton Global Initiative, with a “sterling international image” as perhaps “the most popular man in the world.” Written with the cooperation of Clinton and his staff, the author’s often absorbing chronicle captures the energy and charisma of the former president as he turns to the admiring global community, launching a “frantic, peripatetic career as the world’s best-paid public speaker” and finding a mission in his philanthropic work in Africa, Asia, and elsewhere. While badly bloated with needless details on travels, the sniping of enemies, and ceaseless card games, the book offers sharp insights into the roles of loyal aids, most notably Ira Magaziner, as well as family members in supporting Clinton’s initiatives to fight AIDS and other diseases and to rebuild communities around the world. Inspired by a desire to create a substantive alternative to the World Economic Forum, the CGI has become a powerful model for entrepreneurial cooperation in world affairs. The author offers many telling details: how he learned from Nelson Mandela to view with compassion those who had wronged him; how he bonded with George H.W. Bush in disaster relief efforts and clashed with presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama; and his advising of British Prime Minister Tony Blair at the onset of the Iraq War. Conason also tells the stories of the creation of the Clinton library in Little Rock and the making of the ex-president’s memoir, My Life.
Certain to appeal to Clinton devotees, especially in light of the possibility of still further Bill Clinton endeavors as first gentleman.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4391-5410-6
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2016
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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