Under Reagan, recently all but canonized, the economy suffered, big government grew bigger, the military got new toys but...
The Reagan years were a triumph of the imagination indeed—and a defeat of reality. So suggests presidential biographer Reeves (President Nixon, 2001, etc.), who offers a different Ronald Reagan from that of the hagiographers.
Reeves’s Reagan is sharper than he is given credit for, aware that ideas—not facts—are important, and that assuring words are even more so. Thus, when Jimmy Carter decried the national crisis of confidence in 1979, Reagan was there to say, “I find nothing wrong with Americans,” implying that the crisis was the Democrats. Entering office with just half the vote, Reagan, an ideologue posing as moderate, immediately set about fulfilling four goals: reducing taxes, strengthening the military, containing communism and restoring national pride. Reducing taxes, Reeves shows, meant massive giveaways to the rich; strengthening the military meant running the deficit up to historic levels; containing communism meant the dirty adventurism of Iran-Contra. But some sort of pride was restored, a blind trust that allowed Reagan a pass no matter what his errors. Thus, though fully two-thirds of respondents to a Washington Post poll believed that Reagan was lying about what he knew about said Iran-Contra, “his overall job approval was recorded at 53 percent.” By Reeves’s account, Reagan—at turns earthy, remote and ill-tempered, used to treating even friends as hired hands—could do all manner of wrong and never be called to answer for it. Even his conservative base turned on him when he made one embarrassing error too many, in this instance by failing to respond to the downing of KAL 007. Yet he survived and more, outlasting many a lieutenant against whom he looked quite reasonable (think Al Haig) and even making historical points for his dealings with Gorbachev.
Under Reagan, recently all but canonized, the economy suffered, big government grew bigger, the military got new toys but not better soldiers or leaders. And as for national pride…Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-7432-3022-1
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2005
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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