A vigorous biography (the second this year: see Edwin M. Yoder Jr.'s Joe Alsop's Cold War, p. 156) of the brothers whose journalistic opinion shaped American foreign policy through much of the Cold War. Writing in journals like the Saturday Evening Post, the New York Herald Tribune, and especially Newsweek, Joseph (191089) and Stewart (191474) Alsop espoused militant anticommunism and a robust vision of America as the world's one rightful superpower. They grew up among affluent bluebloods who would advise America's postwar leaders, and they had unprecedented access to presidents from Truman to Carter. Under the Kennedy administration the Alsops reached their zenith as shapers of opinion, offering the president their views on sweeping matters of state and translating Kennedy's aims for their readers. Joseph, the better known of the two, was ``an aristocrat with aristocratic tastes and an aristocratic bearing,'' and also a world-traveling ``shoe-leather reporter.'' Stewart was the more analytical, given to ``long expository pieces designed to lay bare the inner workings of government and the intricacies of major issues.'' Reaching millions of readers, this journalistic tag team redefined the role of the media in American politics, exerting an influence that Merry, executive editor of Congressional Quarterly Publications and former Wall Street Journal Washington correspondent, masterfully explores. (Those who complain that the so-called liberal news media enjoy too much power today ought to note that the way was paved by archconservatives.) But the Alsops were not mere cheerleaders for the power elite, Merry writes; they criticized several administrations for not confronting Russian and Chinese communist expansion more directly. And whereas both Alsops are remembered as hawks, Merry shows that the confusion of Vietnam caused them more than once to reconsider. In the aftermath of that fiasco, their faith in American power bowed but not broken, Joseph summed up their beliefs: ``Nothing endures, because there is always change, and there is always war.'' An important and thoroughly well written addition to the literature on ``the American century.'' (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-670-83868-3
Page Count: 672
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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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