A slim but pertinent on-the-ground narrative that can serve as a starting point for further study.
Admiring account of upstart Emmanuel Macron’s surprising presidential run and the hurdles he must overcome to transform the European Union in the face of American disdain.
Drozdiak, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and former Washington Post senior editor and foreign correspondent, cleanly delineates the young, charismatic French leader’s sweeping aims since his accession to the presidency in 2017: to keep Europe united and vigorous in the wake of right-wing national incursions and American indifference under Donald Trump. First, Macron had to surmount internal revolt to his economic and education reforms and tackle the antiquated labor laws in France, allaying the fears of the so-called Yellow Vest movement. That group rose up in street protests, arguing the Macron was out of touch with rank-and-file workers, who were suffering the effects of “the highest tax burden…of any developed nation.” Macron, new to politics and more of an intellectual than a worker, was broadsided by the many interrelated issues involved in the rich-vs.-poor divide, yet his hasty, earnest implementation of grand national conversations mostly quelled the violence and stoked a valuable debate. “Macron’s grand strategy for his presidency,” writes the author, “was conceived with three goals in mind: to modernize France, to relaunch the drive toward a more unified continent, and to establish Europe as a major power in a multipolar world.” In the wake of anti-immigrant and nationalist violence, Macron hopes that France, and Europe, can “inspire the world by serving as the contemporary incarnation of the Enlightenment and its ideals.” Moreover, notes Drozdiak, Macron is actively serving (whether he likes it or not) as the “Donald whisperer” in defusing American hostility toward European demands and in blocking China’s incursions into European real estate. An admirer of Charles de Gaulle, Macron has said, “Our role everywhere is to be a mediating power.”
A slim but pertinent on-the-ground narrative that can serve as a starting point for further study.Pub Date: May 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5417-4256-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
Chronology, photographs and personal knowledge combine to make a memorable commemorative presentation.
Jackie Kennedy's secret service agent Hill and co-author McCubbin team up for a follow-up to Mrs. Kennedy and Me (2012) in this well-illustrated narrative of those five days 50 years ago when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
Since Hill was part of the secret service detail assigned to protect the president and his wife, his firsthand account of those days is unique. The chronological approach, beginning before the presidential party even left the nation's capital on Nov. 21, shows Kennedy promoting his “New Frontier” policy and how he was received by Texans in San Antonio, Houston and Fort Worth before his arrival in Dallas. A crowd of more than 8,000 greeted him in Houston, and thousands more waited until 11 p.m. to greet the president at his stop in Fort Worth. Photographs highlight the enthusiasm of those who came to the airports and the routes the motorcades followed on that first day. At the Houston Coliseum, Kennedy addressed the leaders who were building NASA for the planned moon landing he had initiated. Hostile ads and flyers circulated in Dallas, but the president and his wife stopped their motorcade to respond to schoolchildren who held up a banner asking the president to stop and shake their hands. Hill recounts how, after Lee Harvey Oswald fired his fatal shots, he jumped onto the back of the presidential limousine. He was present at Parkland Hospital, where the president was declared dead, and on the plane when Lyndon Johnson was sworn in. Hill also reports the funeral procession and the ceremony in Arlington National Cemetery. “[Kennedy] would have not wanted his legacy, fifty years later, to be a debate about the details of his death,” writes the author. “Rather, he would want people to focus on the values and ideals in which he so passionately believed.”
Chronology, photographs and personal knowledge combine to make a memorable commemorative presentation.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4767-3149-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
Occasionally unfocused, but redeems itself by putting a vivid, human face on an unimaginable nightmare.
A ground-level illustration of how the plague ravaged Europe.
For his tenth book, science writer Kelly (Three on the Edge, 1999, etc.) delivers a cultural history of the Black Death based on accounts left by those who witnessed the greatest natural disaster in human history. Spawned somewhere on the steppes of Central Asia, the plague arrived in Europe in 1347, when a Genoese ship carried it to Sicily from a trading post on the Black Sea. Over the next four years, at a time when, as the author notes, “nothing moved faster than the fastest horse,” the disease spread through the entire continent. Eventually, it claimed 25 million lives, one third of the European population. A thermonuclear war would be an equivalent disaster by today's standards, Kelly avers. Much of the narrative depends on the reminiscences of monks, doctors, and other literate people who buried corpses or cared for the sick. As a result, the author has plenty of anecdotes. Common scenes include dogs and children running naked, dirty, and wild through the streets of an empty village, their masters and parents dead; Jews burnt at the stake, scapegoats in a paranoid Christian world; and physicians at the University of Paris consulting the stars to divine cures. These tales give the author opportunities to show Europeans—filthy, malnourished, living in densely packed cities—as easy targets for rats and their plague-bearing fleas. They also allow him to ramble. Kelly has a tendency to lose the trail of the disease in favor of tangents about this or that king, pope, or battle. He returns to his topic only when he shifts to a different country or city in a new chapter, giving the book a haphazard feel. Remarkably, the story ends on a hopeful note. After so many perished, Europe was forced to develop new forms of technology to make up for the labor shortage, laying the groundwork for the modern era.
Occasionally unfocused, but redeems itself by putting a vivid, human face on an unimaginable nightmare.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-000692-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
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