A significant book, if surely arguable in granting Reagan more depth and ability than most nonbelievers have hitherto...
A middle-of-the-road liberal (John Adams, 2003, etc.) looks into Ronald Reagan’s soul and concludes that it was great—and that the president was “politically wise, humane, and magnanimous” to boot.
Reagan was more radical than conservative, by Diggins’s account. He found inspiration in the life and work of Tom Paine, that little acknowledged founding father; he quoted Paine to the Soviets and hailed the Afghan mujahedeen and Nicaraguan contras as Paine’s rightful heirs. He considered the state to be the source of most evil, though his actions, Diggins writes, made big government inevitable; his dream of an almost stateless society and his sensibility generally “partook of the tragic vision of liberalism.” And, Diggins suggests, Reagan’s religion was less inclined to Christian fundamentalism than to a Jeffersonian deism: “He seemed to offer a Christianity without Christ and the crucifixion, a religion without reference to sin, evil, suffering, or sacrifice.” All in all, Diggins writes, Reagan “was a liberal romantic who opened up the American mind to the full blaze of Emersonian optimism.” For this and many other reasons, not least because Reagan knew his Transcendentalists, Diggins holds that Reagan needs serious attention from intellectual historians, who have largely dismissed him as a nonintellectual. Not so, Diggins counters: Reagan was aware of the nature of his arguments, was well schooled in them. If Diggins has a beef, it is with the unworthy neoconservatives who claim Reagan as their own; Diggins faults Reagan’s view of the Cold War as inaccurate and lacking in complexity, for instance, but clearly favors it to the reckless warmaking of the current administration. “To rescue Reagan from many of today’s so-called Reaganites may help rescue America from the pride of its present follies,” he adds.
A significant book, if surely arguable in granting Reagan more depth and ability than most nonbelievers have hitherto suspected.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-393-06022-5
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2006
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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
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