There’s not much what-if here and certainly no indecision. Instead, as if rallying the troops, Sanders writes confidently of...
A dark horse speaks, advancing, after the fact, “an agenda for a new America.”
Leave it to Sanders to be contrary: most politicos, Trump included, write their campaign books while still campaigning. We can only imagine the author believes that his efforts will be ongoing and continual; in that interest, this book capably captures the main points of his message: Washington is corrupt, money needs to be taken out of politics, and the working class needs a fair shake and, yes, a new deal. Sanders begins on a note that could only have come after the race, of course: namely, that nearly 1.5 million people attended his rallies, and his campaign “attracted the energetic support of hundreds of thousands of volunteers in every state in the country.” Here, the author, writing very much as he speaks (“Fortunately, we won that battle,” he says of a Republican effort to cut aid to disabled veterans, “but it sickens me that we even had to wage the fight”), takes a long look at some of the planks that he and his movement pressed onto the Democratic Party platform in the 2016 election, including immigration reform, the $15-per-hour federal minimum wage, and the breakup of banks too big to fail. In the place of any regrets comes plenty of fire and a little ire, as when he impatiently recalls what he considers to be Hillary Clinton’s mischaracterization of his position on guns. “This was an unfair attack,” he writes, “but one that I didn’t handle well.” He adds, “to suggest, as Clinton did, that I was somehow sympathetic to the gun lobby was absurd.” Most of the author’s scorn is reserved, though, for those who stand in the way of his common-sense if sometimes-technical recommendations on such matters as capital gains taxation, Medicare expansion, and infrastructure spending.
There’s not much what-if here and certainly no indecision. Instead, as if rallying the troops, Sanders writes confidently of a program that’s sure to be revisited in 2020.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-13292-5
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2016
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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
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