by Sean Wilentz ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 2, 2006
A worthy introduction to the Age of Jackson, now receiving increased attention from historians.
Old Hickory was a man of actions, not ideas—but a better president than past historians have held.
Few politicians these days, even of a demagogic bent, go out of their way to claim descent along Jacksonian lines, and for good reason: The conservatives of Jackson’s time reviled him as “an American Caesar who had stirred the blockhead masses, seized power, and installed a new despotism”; the liberals of the day and their intellectual progeny reviled Jackson for his anti-abolitionism and his conduct of genocidal campaigns against southeastern Indian peoples. Wilentz (The Rise of American Democracy, 2005, etc.) allows the inutility of using modern labels to categorize political views of the past, and in all events, Jackson is hard to pin down. Wilentz portrays Jackson as a populist who was fonder of Jeffersonian movement than of Federalist stability, who prized egalitarianism over privilege and who personified what other historians have called the Age of Democratic Revolution, which began with the American and French experiments and ended with 1848. He “dedicated his presidency to vindicating and expanding [the prospect that America could be the world’s best hope] by ridding the nation of a recrudescent corrupt privilege that he believed was killing it,” and he was particularly committed to defeating the entrenched wealthy in their own temples—namely, the new banks. Jacksonian monetary policy, always a confusing topic, is rendered fairly lucidly here, though Wilentz plays against tough odds when he has to condense the controversies over hard money versus soft and the effects of international debt on the economy of the early republic into only a few paragraphs. In the end, Wilentz does a solid job of explaining the contributions of the Jackson presidency—and notes that, despite Jackson’s expansionist reputation, during his eight years in office, “Andrew Jackson did not add an inch of soil to the American dominion.”
A worthy introduction to the Age of Jackson, now receiving increased attention from historians.Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-8050-6925-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2005
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 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
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 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
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