Gartner calls this a first-of-its-kind work of “psycho-journalism.” If this is the prototype, let’s hope production is...
A bizarre attempt to uncover what makes the 42nd president tick.
Employing a diagnosis he explored in The Hypomanic Edge (2005), Gartner (Psychology/Johns Hopkins Univ.) identifies Bill Clinton as “hypomanic,” a personality disorder he defines as characterized by excessive energy, creativity and charisma. The author relentlessly scatters “Look, that was hypomanic!” moments throughout the book as he traces Clinton’s life, but readers will soon conclude that these shed little light on what kind of president he was or man he is. Gartner promises that his book will treat its subject as a therapist would a patient. Since he never spent any actual time with Clinton, the “therapy” consists of a ham-handed and superficial accounting of how Clinton acted out childhood dramas during the central moments of his life, including the infamous rendezvous with Monica Lewinsky. The author fails to sustain even this slight approach: Clipping passages from the many accounts of the Clinton presidency, he assembles little more than a compilation. Gartner asserts early on that he is fond of the former president, but that hardly explains this hagiography. The gushing text explains away the former president’s missteps as misunderstandings, his political failures as the failure of the citizenry to understand how someone so smart and empathetic really just had their best interests at heart. Gossipy analysis and ’90s nostalgia make this silly book something of a guilty pleasure, but the author certainly hasn’t provided anything new or groundbreaking.
Gartner calls this a first-of-its-kind work of “psycho-journalism.” If this is the prototype, let’s hope production is halted.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-36976-7
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2008
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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