A revealing biography that should serve as the starting point for future evaluations of the 41st president.
An admiring life of the president who navigated the end game of the Cold War and stood up to Saddam Hussein.
The more time that passes from the end of George H.W. Bush’s one-term presidency, the more important he seems to grow, perhaps in contrast to the more dynamic and obviously flawed personalities of the presidents that served before and after him. Pulitzer Prize–winning author Meacham (Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power, 2012, etc.), working in cooperation with Bush, his wife, Barbara, and their family, does a fine job of revealing the makeup of the man, destined—by virtue of his Eastern Ivy League pedigree and as second son of Prescott Bush, future Connecticut senator—for greatness. Competitive by nature, steady, and dependable—World War II pilot, devoted husband, and loyal Republican Party operative—Bush was decent perhaps to a fault. Americans seem to like their presidents given to grand gestures (see Teddy Roosevelt), but this went against Bush’s buttoned-up, discreet style, to his frequent political misfortune. “He was a victim, in a way, of his instinct for dignity,” writes Meacham. Bush’s innate dignity indeed proved problematic early on with his move to big-oil Texas to set up roots in the late 1950s. The move was an attempt to forge his own destiny apart from his aristocratic East Coast family, but he never quite fit in. Part of Bush’s early agony was caused by adopting positions that were far more conservative and right wing than were consistent with his true views—and then having to reverse them. In the end, he emerged from being eclipsed by larger personalities (Reagan, James Baker, Lee Atwater) to forge a steady, effective course during the world perils in Europe, China, and Iraq. In this meticulously researched but perhaps overlong biography, Meacham does his best with this “underwhelming” but noble subject.
A revealing biography that should serve as the starting point for future evaluations of the 41st president.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6765-7
Page Count: 864
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Nov. 26, 2015
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SEEN & HEARD
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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