Fascinating scholarship from Zeitz, who knows how to present history to an audience of nonspecialists.
Zeitz (Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern, 2006, etc.) approaches the already overloaded realm of Abraham Lincoln studies from a fresh direction.
John Nicolay (1832–1901) and John Hay (1838–1905) were young, intelligent, ambitious men who became acquainted with Lincoln during his pre-presidential years in Springfield, Ill. When Lincoln shifted from obscure Illinois lawyer-legislator to the presidency within a four-year span, Nicolay and Hay became the key members of his staff, controlling access to him in the White House, drafting policy memos, traveling with him around the nation and attending to many of his personal needs. During the Civil War, Nicolay and Hay knew more about Lincoln's thoughts and actions than anybody else. After the assassination, they had to figure out what to reveal about the president they considered a great patriot and in what form to do the revealing. Both experienced distinguished careers inside and outside government, married happily and raised families, but they knew implicitly that they would have to face up to the task of extending the Lincoln legacy. The result: two decades of extensive research with unparalleled access to Lincoln's personal and presidential papers, culminating in a 10-volume, admiring biography. Zeitz does a masterful job delineating the lives of Nicolay and Hay, explaining their roles in political contests, narrating their interactions with Lincoln and placing the Nicolay-Hay biography within the larger context of Lincoln studies. The author is mostly admiring of Nicolay and Hay, while simultaneously factoring in their biases in the service of American history. Readers will quite likely realize the vital role of the massive biography in understanding the seemingly simple man who became a complicated national touchstone.
Fascinating scholarship from Zeitz, who knows how to present history to an audience of nonspecialists.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-670-02566-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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