Destined to win accolades from Fox News.
Linebacker turned JAG officer McGovern delivers propaganda for the Bush administration.
His ideologically driven autobiography denounces steroids, extols Ronald Reagan (under whose leadership “everything changed and it changed for the better”) and explains why loyal Americans shouldn’t criticize the war—which, despite media reports to the contrary, the U.S. is handily winning. Before turning to contemporary geopolitics, McGovern describes his picture-perfect childhood growing up in a large Catholic family devoted to church and the gridiron. After a football career that took him to the NFL, he attended law school and enlisted in the Army Reserves as a member of the Judge Army General Corps (he became a military attorney, in lay terms). After 9/11, he was sent to Afghanistan and then Iraq, but McGovern thinks his most significant work happened at Fort Bragg, where he led the prosecution of Hasan Akbar, a member of the 101st Airborne Division who in 2003 launched a grenade attack against the other men in his unit. One of the book’s few gripping passages describes the horrible violence Akbar unleashed on his fellow soldiers. Elsewhere, McGovern’s prose mostly trades in rah-rah clichés. In his less-than-nuanced view, the Iraq war hasn’t included a single misstep. The U.S. is “engaged in a desperate struggle against forces of hate and repression,” and anyone who questions the war has been brainwashed by the media. Once he sets the record straight, all those gullible doubters will “come to agree we should be in Iraq and Afghanistan and we will succeed…if we just have the courage to see this thing through to victory.” McGovern even papers over Abu Ghraib. Although he doesn’t want to “excuse accusations of terrible crimes committed by a few American service personnel,” he insists that when he visited the prison, he found it to be a bastion of “professionalism, leadership and respect for human dignity.”
Destined to win accolades from Fox News.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2007
ISBN: 0-06-122785-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2006
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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