A fresh, lucid and lively volume of profiles and analysis.
Journalist and biographer Isaacson (Einstein: His Life and Universe, 2007, etc.) on various great Americans.
The author, former managing editor of Time magazine, collects essays and other journalistic pieces focusing on the personalities behind significant figures in American history. Brief, illuminating portraits of Benjamin Franklin and John Adams set the tone, as Isaacson delves into the quirks of temperament that drive history as surely as political forces. The author explores Einstein’s complicated relationship with God, Henry Kissinger’s preoccupation with realpolitik at the expense of “sentimental” ideals and values and Bill Gates’s boyish love of games and competition. Woody Allen’s famous defense of his relationship with his girlfriend’s adopted daughter—“the heart wants what it wants”—occurred in an interview with Isaacson, and the author has interesting things to say on the complex balance of strengths and flaws that complicate the legacy of Bill Clinton. A New Orleans native, Isaacson movingly addresses the devastation of Hurricane Katrina and advises a slow rebuilding approach in order to retain that city’s strange, delicate magic. Other figures profiled include Ronald Reagan, McGeorge Bundy, Madeleine Albright and Colin Powell. In each piece, Isaacson identifies an essential value or quality in the individual and analyzes the ways in which it influences political policy, social change or scientific or technological advancement. It’s an effectively engaging approach, and the short, punchy essays make their points quickly and sustain interest over the course of the book. A few pieces—such as a remembrance of Time editor Henry Grunwald and a couple of prescient op-ed pieces—feel inessential and a bit self-indulgent, but, on the whole, this is a compelling, highly readable collection of fresh perspectives on some of the most significant names in American history.
A fresh, lucid and lively volume of profiles and analysis.Pub Date: Nov. 24, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4391-8064-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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