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BARBARA BUSH

A BIOGRAPHY

Not an authorized biography, but longtime journalist Kilian (What Was Watergate?, YA, 1990) has assembled enough quotes from friends, family, and Mrs. Bush herself to create a lively and credible portrait of this immensely popular First Lady. The story of Barbara Bush's early years could be that of many of her contemporaries. Born into an affluent upper-middle-class home, second daughter in a family of three, she enjoyed a normal childhood filled with friends, sports, and school. Popular and athletic, she was closer to her father than her mother, an austere and aloof woman who was always admonishing young Barbara to watch her weight. Barbara's meeting with George Bush, then a senior at Andover, during the 1941 Christmas season began her long journey from conventional expectations of marriage and family to her national prominence as First Lady. Kilian details the tragedy of the death from leukemia, at age three, of the Bushes' daughter and the rising political career of George. While Barbara has been the uncomplaining good soldier who looked after the children and moved when George's career demanded it, she also, Kilian shows, is a remarkably strong and generous woman, forthright and unaffected. As she told the Wellesley graduating class, she has made three major choices in her life: ``to get involved in something larger'' than herself; to marry George Bush; and ``to make her family and friends paramount, to cherish the human connections.'' The First Lady is also quick to point out the rewards of public life: ``I feel like I have had the best, the most exciting, thrilling life anyone could ever have.'' Barbara Bush is good copy, and Kilian has made the most of her very appealing subject, who seems to have resisted even her darkest moments with common sense and minimal self-pity. An informative biography, then, but not definitive. (Sixteen-page photo insert— not seen.)

Pub Date: June 12, 1992

ISBN: 0-312-07649-5

Page Count: 320

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1992

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

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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