Those who survived the Nixon era will shudder anew; younger readers will find this a lucid survey of a strange time.
A useful account of Richard Nixon’s tumultuous tenure as chief executive.
Presidential chronicler and journalist Reeves (Running in Place: How Bill Clinton Disappointed America, 1996, etc.) has done his homework well for this study of Nixon’s years as president, consulting mountains of recently declassified documents and interviewing Nixon cohorts and confidants such as John Dean, Richard Helms, William Safire, Pat Buchanan, John Ehrlichman, and Egil “Bud” Krogh. For all his hard work, Reeves doesn’t give us much that other biographers and analysts haven’t already provided, including evidence of Nixon’s raging anti-Semitism, his near-pathological paranoia and propensity for lying, and his dislike of the eminently dislikable Henry Kissinger. Still, it’s good to have that evidence in one volume, especially one as well-written as Reeves’s, and even more so given the curious tendency of pundits and historians in the last decade to sign off on Nixon’s own post-presidential efforts to depict himself as one of America’s great statesmen, never mind the unfortunate tactical errors in such matters as Watergate and Vietnam. Reeves gives appropriate nods to Nixon’s very real accomplishments in foreign policy, including his rapprochement with China—which, Reeves documents, occupied Nixon in the earliest days of his first term, though it would not come to pass for several years. Kissinger, who was in the habit of dismissing antiwar protestors as a pack of spoiled children, and who did not brook criticism even from his nominal superiors (“He’s a devious bastard,” Nixon remarked of his primary foreign-policy adviser), comes in for a well-deserved drubbing. Reeves treats others in the Nixon White House with a kind of detached respect, even as he recounts their escapades in selling ambassadorships and subverting the Constitution.
Those who survived the Nixon era will shudder anew; younger readers will find this a lucid survey of a strange time.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-684-80231-7
Page Count: 800
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2001
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
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