A big, wonderfully readable tale certain to delight political junkies.
A winning memoir from a high-end consultant to Democratic presidential candidates.
Shrum, now a senior fellow at NYU, recalls three and a half decades in the political game, where he started out in 1970 as the wunderkind 26-year-old speechwriter for New York Mayor John Lindsay and then became a top and sometimes controversial strategist for a string of unsuccessful presidential hopefuls, from George McGovern and Dick Gephardt to Al Gore and John Kerry. “Sooner or later, your luck is bound to change,” said Ted Kennedy. It never did. But what a ride: After the Georgetown debate team and Harvard Law, he plunged into politics and began crafting the main Democratic messages of our time. Writing with engaging candor, he describes the rise of modern political consulting, offering incisive snapshots of such notables as Edmund Muskie, the doom and gloomer; Jimmy Carter, of the “empty pieties”; and the existential John Kerry. We see Shrum talking theology with Mario Cuomo, advising Bill Clinton in the Lewinsky scandal and enlisting Warren Beatty to help convince McGovern to remove a Ralph Waldo Emerson quote from the end of a speech. (“Look, George, you can’t do this,” said Beatty. “It would be like making love to a beautiful woman…and then at the last minute pulling out and saying, ‘I’ll let Ralph finish for me.’ ”) There are countless bright stories about friends (Hunter S. Thompson, Pamela Harriman and Larry Tribe) and many clients who won election to the U.S. Senate. The book brims with speechwriting tips: Offend no one and you persuade no one. Beware of lines that sound too good not to be used—rhetoric can outpace reality. Like a symphony, he writes, a good political speech rises and rouses the audience, then falls to a quieter level, “transfixing the listeners instead of eliciting applause.”
A big, wonderfully readable tale certain to delight political junkies.Pub Date: June 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-7432-9651-9
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2007
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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