A scholarly biography of one of the great American policy makers and innovators of the 20th century. Hopkins was among the most powerful advisors to Franklin Delano Roosevelt during the New Deal and Second World War. He was in on the creation of some of the boldest experiments in social welfare reform and government assistance to the poor in the nation’s history. And he headed many of the national relief agencies that helped to carry millions of Americans through the Great Depression and left enduring legacies to current social policies. Yet this man, so identified with succor and relief in such American cities as New Orleans, Atlanta, and New York, was a son of small-town Iowa. What propelled him from modest origins to the pinnacle of national influence is the subject of this academic study by his granddaughter. Adding to existing scholarship about the man and the work in which he was for decades so deeply involved, Hopkins (History/Armstrong Atlantic State Univ.) emphasizes her grandfather’s upbringing and education in the world of Grinnell, Iowa, where he also attended its renowned college and drank deep draughts of the Social Gospel and Christian activism. In concentrating on his pre—New Deal social work—the freshest part of her book—Hopkins reveals her ancestor’s openness to new thought and experience and his easy respect for and reliance on women for ideas and guidance. There’s still, however, a whiff of the dissertation about the book; we don’t get as much sense of who this man was, strange when the biographer is also a close family member. Nevertheless, Hopkins’s research adds considerably to the history of modern American welfare policy. (7 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: March 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-312-21206-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1999
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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