Why sully or smash icons when it’s so fun to make new ones out of Silly Putty?
The Bushes are wonderful; the Clintons are not.
Kessler—once an investigative journalist (Washington Post, Wall Street Journal), now a White House apologist (A Matter of Character, 2004, not reviewed)—tells the authorized story of Laura Lane Welch, who married George W. Bush in 1977. Quoting authorities ranging from childhood friends to political allies to the Lone Ranger (really), the intrepid author discovers that Laura wears Cover Girl makeup and Oscar de la Renta gowns. At 17, she ran a stop sign and killed a classmate, but she wasn’t speeding, and the sign wasn’t all that easy to see, you know? She grew up in segregated communities and attended segregated schools. So what? Some of her best friends are . . . you know. An ancestor was named Wiseman. Sounds Jewish but probably isn’t. (Whew!) She used to smoke (still cheats occasionally). She is pro-choice, but on policy matters, she defers to Bushie (her down-home hypocorism for GWB). Bushie himself is like Lincoln, or maybe even Ronald Reagan, and if he’d been president way back whenever it was, the Holocaust wouldn’t have been all that bad. Bushie drank a lot, once, but so do a lot of other people. Laura has read just about every book there is. (Jacqueline Kennedy, by comparison, was a dilettante.) The Clintons ran the White House like a fraternity—greasy old pizza boxes everywhere, people staying up late, wearing jeans. And both Clintons were unkind to the help. Bushie didn’t like Peter Jennings (he was so critical), but the president prayed for him anyhow. Laura—unlike Hillary—keeps her influence quiet and has much better taste in interior decoration. At age 22, the Bush twins were “knockout gorgeous and outrageously charming.” Sure, Jenna drinks a little and used someone’s else’s ID once. Big deal. John Kerry lost on the character issue.
Why sully or smash icons when it’s so fun to make new ones out of Silly Putty?Pub Date: April 4, 2006
ISBN: 0-385-51621-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 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
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
