A sympathetic but also gimlet-eyed scholar’s look at a towering physical and political presence who learned, to his sorrow,...
Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and the War on Poverty have had mixed but lingering results, mostly positive.
Woods (History/Univ. of Arkansas; Shadow Warrior: William Egan Colby and the CIA, 2013, etc.) is a biographer of Johnson (LBJ: Architect of American Ambition, 2006), and this new text is filled with LBJ’s good, bad, and ugly sides. There’s a conversation, for example, with presidential aide Joseph Califano about Califano’s weakness on a negotiation with Congress that will prompt roars of laughter or groans of disgust. The author argues—and demonstrates with considerable effectiveness—that one current (and popular) view of LBJ’s spate of social legislation as a failure is simply inaccurate. He shows the enduring positive effects of Medicare, Medicaid, and other federal programs that dramatically improved the lives of millions. But Woods also recognizes the failures, many of which were exacerbated by the escalating Vietnam War and its financial demands on the budget. LBJ’s plummeting popularity emasculated his effectiveness with the public and with Congress, on whom he’d demonstrated a profound and powerful sway. Woods also deals with the racial explosions of the mid and late 1960s, riots and violent demonstrations that caused the white backlash still evident today. He writes affectingly about the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, the ensuing urban riots, and the worsening inability of LBJ to exercise his desired amount of control. Through the author’s clear prose, we see the frustrations and feelings of betrayal LBJ felt; he had done his best to try to alleviate poverty, to improve education and civil rights, and to work on issues of housing, discrimination, and health care. Yet the war and the increasing public political polarization—now far worse than in Johnson’s day—eventually crumbled all.
A sympathetic but also gimlet-eyed scholar’s look at a towering physical and political presence who learned, to his sorrow, that good intentions were insufficient.Pub Date: April 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-465-05096-3
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
