A timely examination of a would-be savior whose name remains a byword for demagoguery.
A politically informed life of the crusading right-wing senator who saw a communist in every film studio, university, and military barracks.
Joseph McCarthy (1908-1957) began his career in the Senate in 1946 after a surprise victory in Wisconsin over the long-serving Robert La Follette Jr. As Boston-based journalist Tye, the author of biographies of Bobby Kennedy and Satchel Paige, writes, McCarthy ran a bruising campaign of “relentless messaging” as “a kick-’em-in-the-nuts type of candidate.” Decidedly out of his element in the staid confines of the Capitol, he quickly built a reputation, even among his fellow Republicans, as “a gasbag and a pretender.” An undisguised anti-Semite, he carved out a place for himself by teaming up with anti-communist (and Jewish) attorney Roy Cohn and launching a crusade against suspected communists in the government, including, he charged, untold thousands of agents in the State Department and other federal agencies and within the ranks of the armed services. That he did so while frequently hospitalized and treated with “morphine, codeine, Demerol, and other potent narcotics” to battle the alcoholism that would kill him was testimony to his scrappiness. Though notorious for bad judgment—including giving a pass to the Nazis who had murdered American prisoners of war at Malmedy, which, Tye writes, “was just a warm-up act”—McCarthy put the fear in his opponents and browbeat his fellow senators into giving him his lead until he finally took it a step too far in hearings against the U.S. Army. The author concludes his meaty narrative by linking the current occupant of the White House to McCarthy by means of Cohn, “the flesh-and-blood nexus between the senator and the president,” who taught Trump a cardinal lesson: If you say it often enough, loudly enough, and insistently enough, and frighten your listener while you do so, it becomes true—and, if only for a time, a guarantee of success for any tyrant.
A timely examination of a would-be savior whose name remains a byword for demagoguery.Pub Date: July 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-328-95972-0
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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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