A thorough, well-designed overview of—yes, 50 days in the truncated presidency of John Kennedy, which began 50 years ago.
Biographer Golway and reference writer Krantz interpret those incidents in short, factually correct texts marked by plenty of period detail. For instance, as they observe, the very first presidential news-conference broadcast on live television was one of Kennedy’s, this one on the occasion of yet another moment in the Cold War threatened to turn hot—and which preempted that week’s episode of Popeye the Sailor Man. Each incident is accompanied by a high-resolution video from the vaults of NBC, along with a still photograph that can be enlarged at a touch. The text is written in the present tense, lending immediacy to events, as with this from the Bay of Pigs fiasco: “The United States’ role in the invasion is not yet clear. However, Castro has insisted for months that the U.S. has been arming and training rebels to invade his Communist-leaning country.” A bonus is a set of outtakes from the last extended interview JFK gave, this one to Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, whose show was a forerunner of NBC Nightly News—a bit of synchronicity that explains current political commentator David Gregory’s presence at several points in the proceedings.
Well-conceived and easily navigated; not quite comprehensive, but a great place to start.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Running Press
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2011
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The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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