A text both evocative and provocative for readers who like to think.
As our geography has long insulated us from foreign invasion, so has it shaped our temperament and enabled us to become a world power, a category we must modify but continue to inhabit.
In his latest book, Atlantic contributing editor Kaplan (In Europe's Shadow: Two Cold Wars and a Thirty-Year Journey Through Romania and Beyond, 2016, etc.), a senior fellow at the Center for New American Security, employs several approaches. Memoir, literary history, military history, geopolitical analysis—all weave throughout this knowledgeable (and for Kaplan, brief) work. Literary allusions to Robert Frost, William Faulkner, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, and others appear continually, as do extensive meditations on key works about America, which Kaplan calls his “sacred” texts. Principal among these are several by Bernard DeVoto, Walter Prescott Webb, and Wallace Stegner. Kaplan pauses to discuss these texts—which he believes are enduringly relevant—during a long coast-to-coast (east-to-west) car trip he took in the spring of 2015. His was a jagged journey, up and down as well as side to side, and the author visited the usual (Mount Rushmore) and the barely known (small crumbling towns). He notes the vast waterways in the East and Midwest, waterways that allowed settlement and commerce to flourish, and he comments on the aridity of the West and the challenges it continues to present. Not everything he notes is newsworthy—e.g., there is lots of obesity in rural America and sameness in suburban shopping centers; small Western towns are dying—but in his final sections, Kaplan discusses in scholarly but accessible detail the significant role that America has played and must play in this shuddering world. He believes that we are the only ones who really can do so. He also notes with sorrow our treatment of Native Americans, our dire history of slavery, and other colossal failures of heart and humanity.
A text both evocative and provocative for readers who like to think.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-58821-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2016
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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