The underlying point of the book is that Bush/Cheney were right in invading Iraq and waterboarding prisoners. Let the reader...
George W. Bush's vice president speaks—sort of.
Cheney is a company man through and through, a servant of Republican functionaries from the time of LBJ to the recent past—if there is anything to be learned from this bloodless memoir, it is that. The author opens with the outrage of 9/11, in which one thought was foremost on his mind, apart from clearing the sky of planes: namely, “guaranteeing the continuity of a functioning United States government.” In this, he writes, he was the essential element without which that continuity was unsustainable. Cheney’s memoir is political to the extent that he plays the games of hardball politics with everyone he meets, and he makes sure to constantly remind readers of American supremacy and his centrality to it. Colin Powell was his ally until his taste for the war in Iraq weakened, whereupon it was clear to Cheney that Powell had to go. Ditto Condoleezza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld. Cheney’s take on the world is clinical and even scholarly, much like that of Henry Kissinger (another figure whom Cheney does not seem to regard very highly). He is methodical but selective, as when he carefully accounts for his holdings in a certain corporation at the time of his vice presidency: “This was salary that I had already earned, so it was due to me whether the company was doing well or badly.” The company, Halliburton, did well, of course, thanks to no-bid contracts in Iraq—but Cheney still professes irritation that anyone should doubt his clean hands, an irritation expressed by an infamous F-bomb on Capitol Hill (“It was probably not language I should have used on the Senate floor, but it was completely deserved”).
The underlying point of the book is that Bush/Cheney were right in invading Iraq and waterboarding prisoners. Let the reader be the judge—until, that is, history decides on the matter.Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4391-7619-1
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Threshold Editions/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2011
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
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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