Old leopard, new spots, groomed by an acolyte.
If you’re looking for some tyrant-exalting text but for whatever reason are made uncomfortable by the rhetorical (and practical) excesses of, say, Hitler or Mao—well, this is your ticket.
Books by dictators tend to the hortatory: Together you and I can solve the problem; together we’ll lead the world; together we’ll destroy those pesky people next door. Oops. Scratch that last one, for, says The Leader, “All peoples shall have right to existence.” Except, maybe, the people who live in Tel Aviv. Moreover, “The members of Jamahiriyan society”—that is, those who live in sort-of-socialist Libya—“are liberated from any feudalism.” Except, maybe, the slaves who travel across the Libyan Sahara, whose paths are far from The Guide’s green coastline. All of this is the usual cult-of-personality stuff with some curious twists, as when Gaddafi muses on a future that belongs to “the black race,” save that the blacks are “backward” and “sluggish in a climate which is always hot,” and when he assures his gentle readers that “to ignore natural differences between man and woman and mix their roles is . . . hostile to the laws of nature, destructive to human life, and a genuine cause for the wretchedness of human social life.” Once fond of funding people who blew up other people, Gaddafi is now our friend—or so assures French political scientist and hagiographer Jouve, who wonders, “Who is this man who, after making the world tremble with fear, now arouses respect and even praise?” No small amount of that praise comes from the professor himself, who has known Gaddafi for a long time and wants us to know that “his charisma is such that it electrifies his audience,” which makes it all the more tragic that anyone should have ever doubted him.
Old leopard, new spots, groomed by an acolyte.Pub Date: May 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-84454-129-0
Page Count: 262
Publisher: John Blake/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2006
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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