Wonky, as befits the author, but a smart look at not just his life, but also our times.
Diplomat, activist, and former presidential candidate Kerry (A Call to Service: My Vision for a Better America, 2003, etc.) recounts a long life of national service.
First came the Swift boat, then the swift boating. The author explains the title, in relation to his service in Vietnam, as “an expression of gratitude for survival where others did not make it.” Of that experience, Kerry quietly notes, “I can’t say it was a process devoid of moral hazards.” Those hazards, in turn, prompted Kerry to turn against the war, running for Congress as an anti-war candidate even as he was still in uniform, helped along by an understanding admiral. The author evinces some bitterness on the whole matter of the war, and especially Robert McNamara, one of its architects, who “left the battlefield to slink off to the World Bank” and was never adequately called to task for his crimes. Kerry writes ably of the sausage-making aspects of politics, noting the importance of crossing the aisle to actually get things done, as when he and John McCain fought against bête noire Ted Sampley, “a self-appointed POW activist who sold T-shirts, flags, and newsletters on the Mall…[and who] profited grossly from the myth that prisoners were still being held in tiger cages in Vietnam.” Sampley would return in the swift boating business that cost Kerry votes in the presidential run of 2004—but less so, the author suggests, than voter fraud in Ohio: “I wonder how many countries have elections in which machines are privately owned and controlled,” he writes, “where the coding for tallying cannot be inspected or verified because it is ‘proprietary information.’ " Given that such books often signal a political campaign in the offing, one wonders whether Kerry is contemplating another run for office—despite protestations to the contrary. Whatever the case, this memoir makes for fine reading for politics junkies, especially those with an interest in how policy is made.
Wonky, as befits the author, but a smart look at not just his life, but also our times.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-7895-5
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
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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