A solid, well-researched life of one of America’s “finest narrative historians.”
An admiring portrait of a historian who made history.
When he was 28, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. (1917-2007) won a Pulitzer Prize for his first book, The Age of Jackson, an intellectual history of Jacksonian democracy set in a sweeping social, economic, and cultural context. Selling an astonishing 90,000 copies in its first year, it was acclaimed by many historians as “the most influential book of the postwar era” and marked the beginning of Schlesinger’s illustrious career as a writer, professor, prominent liberal intellectual, and, most notably, presidential adviser to John F. Kennedy. Aldous (History/Bard Coll.; Tony Ryan: Ireland’s Aviator, 2013, etc.) draws on Schlesinger’s prolific publications, letters, and diaries, as well as interviews with family members and colleagues, to produce a well-paced, lively biography of a controversial figure. He was a brilliant man derided as “a court historian” for his golden portrayal of the Kennedys as well as an eyewitness to history who held firmly to the “Progressive notion that historical inquiry might promote liberal reform.” A sharp analyst and outspoken adviser, Schlesinger “was both a small ‘d’ democrat and a snob; his clever, ironic personality could also be waspish and peevish.” The son of a historian and Harvard professor, he deferred a career in academia to go to Washington to write for Fortune magazine. There, he socialized with the Georgetown set: Joseph and Stewart Alsop, Philip Graham, Averell Harriman, Clark Clifford, and other influential men. A supporter of Adlai Stevenson, Schlesinger defected to Kennedy, although he questioned the president’s commitment to liberalism. When Kennedy invited Schlesinger to join the White House staff, both men saw the advantage: as “in-house liberal” and “intellectual gadfly,” Schlesinger gained a privileged position as witness, participant, and chronicler; Kennedy saw Schlesinger as a historian-in-residence who would shape and burnish his legacy. He performed that task admirably in A Thousand Days (1964). By the 1990s, identity politics and attention to diversity left his historical stance open to criticism.
A solid, well-researched life of one of America’s “finest narrative historians.”Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-393-24470-0
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
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
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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