A massive, occasionally bloated (will the next volume also run over 1,000 pages?) study of the formation of the young...
Exhaustive account of the first half of Kissinger’s life as a “tale of an education through experience.”
Courted by Kissinger to write this biography 10 years ago (“it was written at his suggestion”), Hoover Institution senior research fellow Ferguson (History, Harvard Univ.; The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die, 2013, etc.) is both fascinated and seduced by the dazzling intellectual breadth of the senior statesman, now in his 90s. From Kissinger’s childhood in Germany, as the Nazis were ascendant, to participating in the official U.S. diplomatic effort to end the Vietnam War, the author finds Kissinger’s development falling into formative stages: seeing his civil servant father stripped of his livelihood and the family terrorized as Orthodox Jews before escaping to New York in 1938; returning to Germany via the Army Specialized Training Program during World War II, followed by de-Nazification work in the ruins of the Third Reich; schooling at Harvard courtesy of the GI Bill, where he found an important mentor in William Elliott and the choice of history for his academic work, specifically the sometimes-fraught choices that freedom awards an individual; his role as a public intellectual, writing about the new “great game” in “psychological warfare” just as the Cold War was heating up; and, finally, the harsh lessons he gained in political reality as adviser to Nelson Rockefeller and as one of John F. Kennedy’s fallible “best and brightest.” In his pronouncements on the war in Vietnam, Ferguson insists Kissinger was an idealist first and foremost: he was “committed to resisting the Communist advance and an advocate of ‘limited war.’ ” Bit by bit, Kissinger was becoming a foreign policy expert with “few rivals.” Ferguson also gives a thorough—sometimes long-winded—assessment of Kissinger’s use of conjecture and risk in policymaking.
A massive, occasionally bloated (will the next volume also run over 1,000 pages?) study of the formation of the young Kissinger, before the idealist became a realist with his selection by President Richard Nixon as national security adviser in 1968.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-59420-653-5
Page Count: 1008
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
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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