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MAX LERNER

PILGRIM IN THE PROMISED LAND

A respectful biography of the immigrant journalist and sometime intellectual gadfly. Lerner, who came to the US from Russia in the wake of revolutionary-era pogroms, enjoyed early success as a scholar, despite the anti-Semitism that greeted him in the academy (a professor of his at Yale warned him, —I hate to tell you this, but you ought to know that, as a Jew, you—ll never get a teaching post in literature in any Ivy League college—). After earning his doctorate, Lerner went on to combine a teaching career at several prominent schools with a parallel career as a —public intellectual,— a journalist and editor for the Nation and other magazines. As a columnist for the short-lived newspaper PM and later the New York Post, Lakoff writes, Lerner would enjoy his greatest influence; an early defender of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal reforms and vocal critic of Supreme Court justices who opposed them, he quickly rose to prominence in liberal circles, and his pieces were widely syndicated and reprinted. Lakoff, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, explores the evolution of Lerner’s political thought from Marxist to anti-Stalinist socialist to Cold War liberal. In the last guise, Lerner supported the American effort to contain the Soviet Union’s perceived expansionism and championed Lyndon Johnson’s policies in Vietnam. He also began to write of matters like Elizabeth Taylor’s marriages instead of the latest legislation or literary novel, and to spend more time at Hugh Hefner’s Playboy mansion than at scholarly conferences. His retreat from activism and apparent acceptance of the status quo lost Lerner readers in the 1960s, and he would never regain his former influence, although writers ranging from William Buckley to I.F. Stone considered him to be among the best political journalists of his day—or any other. For readers interested in modern American political history, Lakoff’s life of the writer will be of much use.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1998

ISBN: 0-226-46831-3

Page Count: 308

Publisher: Univ. of Chicago

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1998

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

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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