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PRISONERS OF HOPE

Name: PRISONERS OF HOPE
Author: Randall B. Woods
ISBN: 978-0-465-05096-3

LYNDON B. JOHNSON, THE GREAT SOCIETY, AND THE LIMITS OF LIBERALISM

by Randall B. Woods ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 5, 2016

A sympathetic but also gimlet-eyed scholar’s look at a towering physical and political presence who learned, to his sorrow,...

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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

Categories:

- BOOK REVIEW
SHADOW WARRIOR
by Randall B. Woods

- BOOK REVIEW
LBJ
by Randall B. Woods

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).

Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)