A first lady who overcame breast cancer and addictions became an inspiration for many Americans.
Former TV news anchor and reporter McCubbin (co-author, with Clint Hill: Five Presidents: My Extraordinary Journey with Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford, 2016, etc.) felt the spirit of Betty Ford (1918-2011) encouraging her as she wrote. “There is little doubt in my mind,” she writes, “that she orchestrated this entire process.” Drawing largely on Ford’s two memoirs and interviews with her children and others close to her, the author fashions an admiring portrait of a woman who faced physical and emotional challenges. A former dancer and model, Betty was a divorced 30-year-old when she married Michigan lawyer Gerald Ford and soon followed him to Washington, D.C., after he won a congressional seat. Being a Washington wife could be difficult: As Jerry’s political responsibilities increased, he traveled constantly, leaving Betty with four active children and the feeling that “the more important her husband became, the less important she was.” Low self-esteem, though, did not keep her from campaigning energetically for Jerry, entertaining, and participating in various clubs and organizations. At home, a full-time housekeeper compensated for a mother who “wasn’t emotionally available” to her children. Despite persistent stage fright, Betty spoke publicly in support of women’s equality, abortion, and even premarital sex, earning praise for her forthright revelation about her bout with breast cancer. In 1964, a pinched nerve caused overwhelming chronic pain, precipitating Betty’s reliance on painkillers, which escalated so dramatically that by 1977, she swallowed handfuls of pills morning and night, along with more than a few drinks. Besides pain, she suffered from depression, which McCubbin does not deeply probe. Although she portrays the couple as deeply devoted, as Betty sank into alcoholism and drug dependency, Jerry refused to confront the problem. Like many families of addicts, different members took on “various codependent roles in order to cope: enabler, hero, scapegoat, lost child, mascot.” Finally overcoming her addictions, Betty went on to co-found a well-regarded treatment center.
A warmly sympathetic biography of a spirited woman.Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6468-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HISTORY | UNITED STATES | GENERAL HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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