Historians will wince at some of the hyperbole and speculative conclusions, but Kennedy junkies will gobble it up.
First of a projected two volumes, pulling together in sometimes mind-numbing detail the lives of the men in a family that dominated the American imagination during the last half of the 20th century.
Leamer (The Kennedy Women, 1994, etc.) offers a relatively evenhanded although ultimately admiring examination of the relationships among Joseph Kennedy and his four sons: Joe Jr. (WWII hero, killed in action), Jack (president, assassinated), Bobby (attorney general and senator from New York, assassinated) and Teddy (baby of the family and longtime senator from Massachusetts, plagued by scandal). All the old questions are here, but so are the old answers, albeit amplified with new documents and interviews. Did Joe Sr. make money from bootlegging liquor? Probably. Did he buy his son Jack the presidency? Not really, although he certainly spent a lot of money and called in many favors. Was Jack the swordsman that he was reputed to be? Even more so. Not exactly breaking news, but by bundling the lives of the Kennedy men together and emphasizing family influences, Leamer is able to clarify some of the seeming contradictions in their personal and political acts. For instance, Joe Sr. single-mindedly groomed his sons for public lives, but he was also a loving and supportive father. President Kennedy admired nothing more than physical and moral courage, but often waffled on taking a stand if the political stakes were high. Attorney General Kennedy’s sometimes vicious handling of colleagues on behalf of his brother contrasted with his real concern for the suffering of other human beings. In the survey of JFK’s presidency, the Cuba crises and the so-called mob connections receive a considerable share of attention, the civil-rights movement perhaps not as much as it deserves. This hefty tome ends with JFK’s funeral, with much of Bob and Ted’s stories still to come.
Historians will wince at some of the hyperbole and speculative conclusions, but Kennedy junkies will gobble it up.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2001
ISBN: 0-688-16315-7
Page Count: 880
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2001
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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