Well-written and useful, though William Leuchtenberg’s Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal (1963) remains the...
The birth of the New Deal, capably recounted.
Newsweek editor Alter takes a 100-odd pages before addressing his subject, the fraught three-odd-months that newly inaugurated President Franklin Roosevelt had to push through an ambitious package of social and financial programs before congressional resistance solidified. Once the narrative gets on track, modern readers will understand why FDR was so widely perceived as a usurper; even democrat Eleanor Roosevelt allowed that the country, laid low by the Depression, could use a benevolent dictator, and Roosevelt was no stranger to a bully pulpit. Alter adds that back then it was easy to confuse liberals and conservatives, since, for one thing, “the responsible conservative view of the day was that steep tax increases were essential to balancing the budget.” In that view, Roosevelt made a fine conservative, though he accepted a broad range of progressive programs that his liberal brain trust put together: unemployment relief, extensive public-works programs, old-age insurance and a program to formulate minimum-wage guidelines and other labor reforms. He thus inspired, even courted, opposition. But, Alter notes, FDR had something up his sleeve: He withheld 60,000 political patronage jobs customarily shared out to Congress until after the Hundred Days, a most efficient form of keeping legislators in line. Therein lies a key to understanding FDR’s character, and his knack for getting what he wanted; the president was a born Machiavellian, so secretive, he once said, that “I never let my right hand know what my left hand does.” A good recipe for dictatorship for sure, but FDR kept his own democratic values intact, even as right-wing opponents called him “Stalin Delano Roosevelt.”
Well-written and useful, though William Leuchtenberg’s Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal (1963) remains the unseated—and just as readable—standard.Pub Date: May 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-7432-4600-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2006
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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