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BURR, HAMILTON AND JEFFERSON

A STUDY IN CHARACTER

In a study of three Founders, Kennedy, director emeritus of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History and a prolific author (Hidden Cities, 1994, etc.), demonstrates his devotion to underdogs, in particular Aaron Burr. New York attorney general and vice president of the US, Burr was once tapped as Jefferson’s successor to the presidency, but his political career shriveled when he lost a gubernatorial election, and in 1806, Jefferson accused him of treason. His papers were lost, and his daughter, his most promising hagiographer, died before beginning a biography of her dad. That 19th-century notables including Harriet Beecher Stowe and John Quincy Adams maligned Burr as a womanizing rapscallion didn’t help Burr’s reputation. A spin doctor’s nightmare? In Kennedy’s hands, Burr appears admirable: a proto-feminist, taken with Mary Wollstonecraft’s writings; a defender of Kennedy’s other favorite underdog, Native Americans; and a committed abolitionist. Kennedy explores the careers and characters of Hamilton and Jefferson as well, arguing that they cannot be understood without first knowing Burr. If Burr is the hero of this book, neither Jefferson nor Hamilton is quite the villain—each was “ambitious,” each “on occasion noble, generous, and touching in [his] willingness to express [his] affections.” Kennedy has a penchant for unsubstantiated psychobabble. Pause critically when he waxes Oprah-esque about the psychic damage done to Burr and Hamilton by traumatic childhoods; raise a quizzical eyebrow at his suggestion that Jefferson’s vitriol was stoked by Burr’s matchmaking—in introducing James Madison to Dolley Payne, Burr no doubt altered the relationship of “the great little Madison” and the Sage of Monticello, two “brilliant and lonely men” who had toiled together as “bachelor partners” for 14 years after the death of Jefferson’s wife, though that’s hardly grounds for branding your VP a traitor. Kennedy is no Gore Vidal, yet, in an engaging and lightly ironic tone, he offers a worthwhile portrait of powerful politicians in early America. (30 photos) (First printing of 40,000; Book-of-the-Month Club and History Book Club alternate selections; author tour)

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1999

ISBN: 0-19-513055-3

Page Count: 480

Publisher: Oxford Univ.

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1999

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

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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