An excellent resource that hews to the president’s words as reflecting or obscuring his actions.
A fine, fully fleshed portrait of Franklin Roosevelt during his final years, in his own words.
As he did in his previous volume, Franklin D. Roosevelt: Road to the New Deal: 1882-1939 (2015), Daniels (Emeritus, History/Univ. of Cincinnati) sticks to FDR’s public utterances, offering extensive extracts of speeches and communiqués to elucidate the evolution of his wartime policy. The early probing question—during the 1940 presidential campaign, as FDR was champing at the bit to aid beleaguered Britain while skirting the prevailing isolationist atmosphere in America—remains: “to what degree the president was deliberately misleading the American people about his foreign policy intentions”? The answer, from the record Daniels presents, was a great deal. However, the author fairly examines the communiqués regarding the peace mission with the Japanese in late 1941 (just prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor), and the president seemed to be sincerely hoping to maintain peace in the Pacific as long as possible rather than provoke a Japanese attack. During these fraught war years, FDR and his administration were particularly concerned with managing the civilian economy in support of the war effort, as the substantial body of this work takes up in detail. Daniels spotlights FDR’s early and extraordinary emphasis on creating the future United Nations. He had a vision of a peaceful postwar world when no peace was in sight, and he pushed for the prosecution of war criminals. Moreover, Daniels exposes the duplicitous “spin” given by the White House physician, who deliberately underplayed (or ignored) the severity of the president’s heart condition. The author does a fine historical service in allowing FDR’s rich, wise, moving words to emerge here, giving an illuminating portrait of a president in time of unprecedented world crisis.
An excellent resource that hews to the president’s words as reflecting or obscuring his actions.Pub Date: March 30, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-252-03952-2
Page Count: 712
Publisher: Univ. of Illinois
Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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