Presidential historian Dallek (History/Boston Univ.; Hail to the Chief, 1996) has all the dogged persistence of the scholar, but little of a master biographer’s panache. Yet even in his conventional telling, LBJ emerges as a Texas-tall-tale hero who walks improbably into an almost Sophoclean tragedy. LBJ’s probably apocryphal rejoinder to German chancellor Ludwig Erhard’s query on whether he had been born in a log cabin—“No . . . I was born in a manger”—captures the Texan’s grandiosity, yet Dallek also reveals a politician of surpassing intelligence and drive undone by raging insecurity. Picking up where his 1991 volume Lone Star Rising left off, Dallek begins with a chapter on Johnson’s two years of frustration and irrelevance as vice president. John Kennedy’s assassination filled him with “the guilt of a competitive older brother . . . who suddenly displaces his younger, more successful rival,” but also catapulted him into the only suitable outlet for his whirlwind energy. Dallek offers a comprehensive account of how LBJ masterminded epochal reform measures that affected nearly every American, including civil rights, Medicare, federal aid to education, consumer protection, and environmentalism. Yet he also acknowledges that Johnson spent millions on the war on poverty in what really was an experiment. Few Oval Office occupants had more extensive pre-presidential experience in foreign affairs than Johnson, but Dallek demonstrates that, as early as his response to anti-American agitation in Panama in 1964, LBJ behaved erratically. In Vietnam, his confusion reflected both a sincere commitment to halting communism and a mounting paranoia that Dallek says “raises questions about executive incapacity that can neither be ignored nor easily addressed.” Dallek’s extensive use of oral histories and interviews has uncovered some fascinating details (e.g., Johnson favored Nelson Rockefeller as his successor), but ultimately does little to encourage new understanding of LBJ. But this remains a fair, impressively researched reassessment of this most complicated of presidents. (Feature in the Atlantic Monthly; $50,000 ad/promo; Book-of-the-Month Club/History Book Club selection; author tour)
Pub Date: April 16, 1998
ISBN: 0-19-505465-2
Page Count: 736
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1998
The grand sweep of American history is writ small in this family history/memoir by humorist Frazier (Great Plains, 1989, etc.). Frazier undertook this effort after his parents died in the late 1980s, to ``find a meaning that would defeat death.'' But his project seems more complicated and self-conscious, if not pretentious: an attempt to somehow reclaim American history for himself, a white Protestant. His preoccupation with his own religious doubt, contrasted with the firm faith of his ancestors- -whether German Reformed, Old School Presbyterian, or, like his great-great-grandfather Simeon Frazier, a member of the antiauthoritarian Disciples of Christ—culminates in a strange, reductionist review of American history as an expression of the decline of Protestant faith. More broadly, Frazier shares indiscriminately with us every detail he has been able to root out: from the momentous (the arrival of Thomas Benedict on these shores in 1638 and his descendant Platt Benedict's founding of Norwalk, Ohio) to the trivial (his great-great-uncle Charles's first attempt at fly-fishing and his grandmother's showing family pictures to Tennessee Williams in Key West). The quantity of information that could have rendered full-blooded portraits of long-ago generations is lacking; the lengthy catalogs often offered (trite entries from a great-grandfather's school diary, quotations from his parents' rather ordinary love letters) seem like fillers. The histories of the Fraziers, Wickhams, Benedicts, and Hurshes do follow the outlines of American history: the push west (all his relatives ended up in Ohio); the Civil War (Norwalk was a stop on the underground railroad); industrialization (his father became a chemist for Sohio). But Frazier's prose is flat as a prairie and his humor dry as stone. Only at the end, in interviews with two colorful relatives, and with the description of the deaths of his teenage brother Fritz from leukemia and of his parents, does the tale reach emotional heights. An object lesson in the pitfalls of writing a family history for anyone other than your family. (First printing of 50,000; $50,000 ad/promo; author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1994
ISBN: 0-374-15319-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1994
Imagine a collaboration between Arnold Toynbee and R. Crumb and you get a pretty good idea of Gonick's clever and ambitious comic book series. This volume should not be taken as some kind of Mel Brooksish joke. Gonick does his research and interprets his sources with scholarly care. Inspired by the educational comic books of Latin American artist RIUS, Gonick makes world history a blast— literally, with his predilection for onomatopoeic word balloons. In this second collection—the last left us with Alexander the Great schlepping toward Persia—Gonick takes us on a side tour through India and China. He integrates myth and history to establish the origins of sectarian conflict in India, and attends to migration patterns from the Middle East to China in order to explain the development of Buddhism and Confucianism. Dynamic intrigue and the threat of northern barbarians compete with periods of prolonged peace. This highly selective version of Chinese history, though full of diverting stories, will be a bit confusing to readers unfamiliar with the main players. Back in Rome, meanwhile, after the death of Alexander, the republic enters its period of glory, followed by the building of the empire. Problems of succession lead to lots of lurid anecdotes about perverse and insatiable emperors, violent entertainments, brutal conquests—all of which Gonick records with Mad-like irreverence. He equivocates, however, in telling the story of Jesus, ending up with an uneasy mix of canonical fact and outright heresy. His account of the historical rise of Christianity is superb and demonstrates an interesting parallel with China: In both cases alien cults from the edge of the empires eventually captured the capital cities. Gonick's humor is mostly visual and relies on the juxtaposition of comical images with his relatively sober text. Despite his lefty, multi-culty inclinations, Gonick maintains the high level of sophistication, skepticism, and just plain fun established by the first volume.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-385-42093-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1994
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