Intriguing pieces, unobtrusively and skillfully edited, that form both a time and a timeless capsule.
An eclectic collection from the highly literate and scholarly president of the United States.
Editor Hutner (English/Univ. of Illinois; What America Read: Taste, Class, and the Novel, 1920–1960, 2008) had a difficult task: selecting representative samples from among the mountains of Roosevelt’s publications. Some selections are unsurprising—from his opening essay on “The Strenuous Life” to his account of the taking of San Juan Hill (with two different descriptions of brains leaking from head wounds)—but there are also some welcome surprises. In a 1903 speech at the New York State Fair, he declared his solidarity with the common man in an allusion to The Three Musketeers—“All for each and each for all”—and passages from his 1910 speech at Osawatomie, Kan., seem lifted from a progressive op-ed piece from last week’s New York Times. Frequently, Roosevelt urged workers to organize—and then be reasonable. He argued for control of trusts, for women’s rights (wives, he said, should be partners, not servants) and for equal treatment of blacks. His racial ideas, though (as the editor notes), were progressive for Roosevelt’s time—not ours. He praised the performance of black soldiers in Cuba but also notes that “of course” they need white officers. In addition, he had kind words for the Indian warriors we slaughtered. Also included is a long 1912 speech about the necessity of historians to write with the imagination of the novelist (a dictum he did not always manage to follow), a sanguinary piece about the pleasures of shooting grizzly bears, the expected stuff about keeping fit and being virtuous (he sounds sometimes like a gung-ho Boy Scout leader), and the necessity of maintaining a war-ready army and navy.
Intriguing pieces, unobtrusively and skillfully edited, that form both a time and a timeless capsule.Pub Date: April 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-345-80611-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2014
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
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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