Producing a biography of a living, controversial politician is always difficult. D’Antonio and Eisner have succeeded in this...
Award-winning, veteran journalists collaborate on a well-researched and moderately toned yet searing biography of Vice President Mike Pence (b. 1959).
D’Antonio (A Consequential President: The Legacy of Barack Obama, 2017, etc.) and Eisner (MacArthur's Spies: The Soldier, the Singer, and the Spymaster Who Defied the Japanese in World War II, 2017, etc.) begin with Pence’s middle-class, Catholic, politically moderate Indiana upbringing before tracing how the ambitious, polite young man turned toward increasingly exclusionary politics during the presidency of Ronald Reagan. As for the religious component, Pence’s mainstream Catholicism morphed into evangelical zealotry with a heavy emphasis on the inerrancy of the Bible. Pence came to believe that God decided the path of every human; while still a student, he also adopted the notion that God would elevate him to the presidency. Of course, at such an early age, he did not foresee that serving as vice president to Donald Trump would constitute part of God’s plan. When that became reality much later, Pence tolerated Trump’s vitriol and scandals as preordained by God, simply a means to an end. The authors devote the final third of the book to the Trump-Pence partnership. In the middle sections, they document Pence’s marriage; an unfocused, meandering work history during his 20s; and impatient attempts to join the House of Representatives by defeating an entrenched Democratic incumbent. Pence lost twice before starting a career as an Indiana radio personality, which, a decade later, provided the name recognition he needed to become a Congressman. The authors provide copious evidence of Pence’s lackluster legislative accomplishments in Washington, D.C.; nonetheless, Pence won the governorship of Indiana in 2012. He demonstrated a low level of interest in actually governing, and he was often evasive or heartless when confronted with hot-button issues. Trump showed little interest in Pence’s legislative record, focusing instead on Pence’s patina of inoffensive behavior, pleasant physical appearance, and faith-based zealotry.
Producing a biography of a living, controversial politician is always difficult. D’Antonio and Eisner have succeeded in this well-documented, damning book. Cue the outrage from Sean Hannity et al.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-30119-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
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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