With this volume Kissinger concludes what may be the greatest memoir ever written by an American statesman (White House Years, 1979; Years of Upheaval, 1982). It is a tribute to the quality of his narrative that the reader is often entranced by the personalities and diplomatic maneuverings of the Ford administration, a quarter of a century ago. Of course, Kissinger does not always resist the temptation to be more prescient than he was at the time. Thus the statesman, who discerned in 1977 that we faced the ’stark reality that the [communist] challenge is unending,” reports on going to Moscow several years earlier that one “could not but gain the impression that the whole elaborately constructed stage set was precarious and might collapse at any moment.” Not surprisingly, we also see more of the good Henry, charitable in his judgments, even of bureaucratic enemies, and open in his methods, than the bad Henry (—Trust does not come to me spontaneously—). But the performance is always a bravura one: there is hardly a page without a wise observation or maxim of statecraft, or a characterization full of insight, including masterful sketches of Nixon, Ford, Mao, Helmut Schmidt, and a host of other leaders. There is just one point at which the tone, wise, avuncular, witty, and epigrammatic changes dramatically, and that is on the withdrawal of the US from Vietnam. Kissinger argues with anguished passion that those in Congress who called for US withdrawal welshed on their commitment to provide aid to the South Vietnamese when the US left; that the US abandonment was shameful; that it led to genocide and tragedy in Vietnam and Cambodia; and that it deeply injured the reputation and the interests of the US throughout the world. Enough time may now have elapsed for the truth of these observations to be more widely acknowledged. A brilliant, masterly, even seminal book.
Pub Date: March 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-684-85571-2
Page Count: 1168
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1999
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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