A welcome glimpse into the little-known time between the Civil War and the Gilded Age.
A behind-the-curtains glimpse at an often overlooked presidency, and at the cabals and conspiracies that brought it to an end.
John Garfield was something of an accidental president, a dark horse brought onto the national scene in the wake of the many scandals that rocked the administration of Ulysses S. Grant. Washington insider Ackerman, who has held various civil-service posts over the last three decades, has an evident appreciation for the Ohio Republican, who wasn’t exactly unwilling to see his hat tossed into the ring but hadn’t exactly gone out of his way to court high office, either. Garfield would have done better to stay on the farm, to judge by Ackerman’s engaging account of events, for Garfield found himself caught in the middle of a longtime feud between party bosses Roscoe Conkling and James G. Blaine, who hated each other with a fine passion and had been fighting for control of the Capitol for years. Garfield developed a platform of compromise that might surprise a few GOP loyalists today—including a staunch repudiation of “the pernicious doctrine of State supremacy”; support for federal funding for universal, secular education; and opposition to free trade and “doubtful financial experiments” such as federal intervention in the market. Still, for all his efforts at reconciliation, when Garfield was finally elected—and much of Ackerman’s account deals with his tortuous path to the White House—he had to maneuver his way between Conkling and Blaine, pleasing neither with his choice of lieutenants and initiatives. Enter Charles Guiteau, the assassin who gunned Garfield down in 1881; though often described as a disappointed office-seeker and lunatic, he pulled the trigger as a committed “stalwart” who wanted to see Garfield out of office and Garfield’s vice president Chester Arthur in—as did Conkling, who allegedly endorsed the murder. Did Guiteau act alone? Ackerman has some ideas about that, and about the condition of national politics 12 decades ago.
A welcome glimpse into the little-known time between the Civil War and the Gilded Age.Pub Date: July 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7867-1151-5
Page Count: 560
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
