A sort-of-liberal president faces an intransigent, obstructionist Congress: We mean Lyndon Johnson, of course, and the class of 1966.
Zelizer (History and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.; Governing America: The Revival of Political History, 2012, etc.), a lucid writer, doesn’t need to cherry-pick to line up parallels with today. We—and many historians, he writes—tend to think of LBJ’s Great Society initiatives as programs that sailed through the legislature and, as if by magic, bettered lives through various pieces of civil rights reforms and new institutions such as the Job Corps—which “caused more controversy,” Zelizer writes, “than any other program in the [Equal Opportunity Act].” But why did the Job Corps cause such controversy? Because southerners, conservatives and state’s rights stalwarts in Congress opposed any federal program that challenged homegrown traditions such as segregation. “While some southerners grumbled about any distribution of funds to African Americans,” writes the author, “they were happy to see federal money go to the poor whites who were their constituent base.” As Zelizer notes, considerable energy in Washington went to calumny over liberalism and conservative purity and pieties, the right wing having regained considerable ground in the 1950s after the years of exile during the New Deal era. The author writes carefully of how the filibuster was exercised to quash Johnson’s programs by keeping them from coming up for a vote and of the “deadlocked democracy” that resulted. Johnson may have beaten Goldwater in 1964, but the right wing came rushing at him in the election of 1966, and of course, Richard Nixon followed two years later. The resulting opposition was fierce, and Johnson was defeated or stymied at many turns, including in his efforts to implement fair housing regulations, a nonstarter in the South—but, surprisingly, also in places like Chicago and Boston.
It wasn’t all the same, though: The Republicans had a moderate wing in those days. As with all Zelizer’s books, this is a smart, provocative study.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-1594204340
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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A master storyteller’s character-driven account of a storied year in the American Revolution.
Against world systems, economic determinist and other external-cause schools of historical thought, McCullough (John Adams, 2001, etc.) has an old-fashioned fondness for the great- (and not-so-great) man tradition, which may not have much explanatory power but almost always yields better-written books. McCullough opens with a courteous nod to the customary villain in the story of American independence, George III, who turns out to be a pleasant and artistically inclined fellow who relied on poor advice; his Westmoreland, for instance, was a British general named Grant who boasted that with 5,000 soldiers he “could march from one end of the American continent to the other.” Other British officers agitated for peace, even as George wondered why Americans would not understand that to be a British subject was to be free by definition. Against these men stood arrayed a rebel army that was, at the least, unimpressive; McCullough observes that New Englanders, for instance, considered washing clothes to be women’s work and so wore filthy clothes until they rotted, with the result that Burgoyne and company had a point in thinking the Continentals a bunch of ragamuffins. The Americans’ military fortunes were none too good for much of 1776, the year of the Declaration; at the slowly unfolding battle for control over New York, George Washington was moved to despair at the sight of sometimes drunk soldiers running from the enemy and of their officers “who, instead of attending to their duty, had stood gazing like bumpkins” at the spectacle. For a man such as Washington, to be a laughingstock was the supreme insult, but the British were driven by other motives than to irritate the general—not least of them reluctance to give up a rich, fertile and beautiful land that, McCullough notes, was providing the world’s highest standard of living in 1776.
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-2671-2
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
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