An easygoing, not particularly deep visit to a place where presidents are “more reflective, playful, and energized by the...
A portrait of the Camp David retreat, from a former commanding officer of the facility.
During the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, Giorgione, a retired rear admiral, was the CO at Camp David, a sprawling compound in the Maryland woods that includes a theater, bowling alley, pool, gym, horseshoe pits, driving range, bicycles, golf carts, helicopter port, chapel, weather station, maintenance shops, and gift shop, as well as the presidential quarters and many guest cottages. True to its mission, Camp David has no place for the press, and, as can be expected, the author does not offer details regarding security arrangements. Since World War II and the days of Franklin Roosevelt, whose cottage had the only indoor plumbing, there have been countless officers posted with their families at the now-luxurious getaway; command is regularly rotated. Giorgione consulted with other COs to provide this pop history of a vacation spot with a strictly limited clientele. For more than seven decades, every president and his family have enjoyed fine amenities and devoted treatment. (No word from Giorgione, though, regarding the present occupant of the White House, who seems to prefer to rusticate at Mar-a-Lago.) The author opines “that the president is a person like you and me, as far as a psychological and emotional makeup go,” a debatable assertion. Camp David has also been a site for many summits and diplomatic meetings that kept the staff working overtime. The crew must be strictly apolitical, offering every president the utmost respect that the military owes the commander in chief. Civilians, however, may detect, despite relaxed presidential pleasantries, a faint air of obsequious servility. Along with the placid yarns of chief executives and their folks, the author also offers some basic counsel on the art of management.
An easygoing, not particularly deep visit to a place where presidents are “more reflective, playful, and energized by the hills and forests that surround them.”Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-316-50961-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 21, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
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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