Newsweek)
A balanced and insightful account of the life of the Vice President from a Washington correspondent for Newsweek.
Turque begins in Nashville in October 1999 with a snapshot of candidate Gore, a man who has "squandered his advantages with such breathtaking speed." The Vice President has just moved his headquarters to Nashville from Washington, a move that is both practical and powerfully symbolic of his desire to distance himself from Beltway politics (and especially from the culture of scandal that has damaged the Clinton administration). We are then offered a quick account of a grim evening in November 1970 when Senator Albert Gore Sr. was defeated for reelection before returning to a chronology of the younger Gore’s career. Turque gives compelling portraits of Gore’s parents (the Vice President’s mother was the only woman in Vanderbilt Law School’s class of 1936) and paints a largely sympathetic view of his subject as he plods through school (St. Albans) and college (Harvard). Turque does not hesitate, however, to share some details of Gore’s adolescent sex life and restrained experimentation with marijuana (yes, he inhaled). He acknowledges Gore’s courage in volunteering for military service during the Vietnam War, and he clearly admires Gore’s intelligence and tenacity. But he chides the Vice President for some of his character flaws—specifically for inflating his accomplishments (the famous claim to have invented the Internet) and for a "zeal for election money in 1996 [that] eroded his judgment, sense of propriety, and usual attention to detail." Turque writes with the confidence born of exhaustive research (although both Al and Tipper Gore refused requests for interviews) and only occasionally slips—as when he twice employs the same folksy simile: "like a piece of chewing gum on the sole of his shoe." A fluid, intelligent biography—both comprehensive and comprehending. (20 b&w photos, not seen) (First serial rights to
Newsweek)Pub Date: March 23, 2000
ISBN: 0-395-88323-7
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2000
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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