An engrossing biography that is highly relevant in today’s America.
A penetrating portrait of a powerful Washington insider.
New York Times chief White House correspondent Baker and New Yorker staff writer Glasser bring political acumen and thorough research to their absorbing biography of James Addison Baker III (b. 1930), who served presidents Ford, Reagan, and both Bushes, decisively shaping American policies at home and abroad. Drawing on prodigious sources, including more than 210 interviews (70 hours with Baker), the authors offer a balanced view of a man praised for being pragmatic, scrupulously organized, and authoritative, and derided as manipulative, self-aggrandizing, and cynical. He habitually leaked information and “cunningly took credit for something he actually opposed in order to pocket a chit.” One political columnist noted, “taking responsibility isn’t Jim Baker’s style.” Born into an influential Texas family, he followed his father into corporate law, where he felt bored. In 1975, his longtime friend George H.W. Bush recommended him for undersecretary of commerce in Ford’s administration. His impressive political savvy led Ford to tap Baker to run his 1976 presidential campaign; although Ford lost to Jimmy Carter, Baker saw his own reputation rise. When Reagan took office in 1981, he made Baker his White House chief of staff. The authors portray Reagan as distracted and distant but also “a man of driving ambition and more calculation than his public image suggested.” Baker, too, was ambitious, and he could be ruthless in pursuing his goals. After running the White House, Baker became secretary of the treasury and, in George H.W. Bush’s administration, secretary of state. Although he spoke no foreign languages and had no international relations experience, he succeeded in helping to reunify Germany, organize a crucial Middle East peace conference, deal with the Iran-Contra scandal and Iraq’s incursion into Kuwait, and preside over the end of the Cold War. He later served as chief counsel for George W. Bush during the 2000 election recount. With Baker as their focus, the authors afford a sharp, insightful view into Washington dealmaking.
An engrossing biography that is highly relevant in today’s America.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-385-54055-1
Page Count: 732
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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