You don’t need to be black or a minority to grasp the need to stand up and fight in today’s political world. The authors lay...
The fascinating story of four women who got into politics in the 1960s and ’70s and are now the rare Washington insiders who understand people from all areas of the nation.
The authors—Brazile (Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House, 2017), a Democratic political strategist and TV commentator; Caraway, a public relations executive and Democratic strategist; Daughtry, a preacher, organizer, and CEO of the 2008 and 2016 Democratic National Conventions; and Moore, a former assistant to Bill Clinton—all came from different parts of the country but had in common strong family upbringings and a devotion to civil rights. The list of their mentors is an all-star cast: Ron Brown, Oprah Winfrey, Maria Shriver, Vernon Jordan, and the Rev. Willie Barrow. Each author remembers vividly the first time she met Jesse Jackson; Brazile worked on his first presidential campaign. Caraway has held key leadership roles in nearly every major presidential campaign of the past couple decades. Daughtry was CEO of the DNC, twice. Moore served in Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition and became director of political affairs at the White House. They shared their lives as true friends, weathering setbacks, disagreements, and breaks but always trusting each other. Their individual strengths increase significantly when they’re together, as they were during the 2004 election. Washington power brokers regularly host informal dinners for presidential hopefuls, and the authors decided to do the same. The rules were simple: The candidate would come alone, be responsible for the bill, and everything was off the record. The dinners would include the candidate, the four women, and some of their associates—though the meals with Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were jam-packed. The authors’ description of the professionalism and political savvy exhibited and/or lacking at those meals is eye-opening.
You don’t need to be black or a minority to grasp the need to stand up and fight in today’s political world. The authors lay it out well in this solid primer on how to “dare to enter the halls of power.”Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-13771-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
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
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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