Afbeelding auteur

Tom Wicker (1926–2011)

Auteur van Dwight D. Eisenhower

24+ Werken 968 Leden 11 Besprekingen Favoriet van 1 leden

Over de Auteur

Tom Wicker was born in Hamlet, North Carolina on June 18, 1926. He served in the Navy during World War II. He received a degree in journalism from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1948. Over the next decade, he was an editor and reporter at several newspapers in North Carolina. He toon meer started working for The New York Times in 1960 and became the paper's Washington bureau chief and a political columnist for 25 years. He was riding in the presidential motorcade when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. He wrote 20 books, 10 fiction works and 10 non-fiction works. His fiction works include Facing the Lions, Unto This Hour, Donovan's Wife, and Easter Lilly. His non-fiction works include A Time to Die, Kennedy without Tears: The Man Beneath the Myth, JFK and LBJ: The Influence of Personality Upon Politics, One of Us: Richard Nixon and the American Dream, Tragic Failure: Racial Integration in America, On the Record: An Insider's Guide to Journalism, and Shooting Star: The Brief Arc of Joe McCarthy. He died of a heart attack on November 25, 2011 at the age of 85. (Bowker Author Biography) toon minder

Werken van Tom Wicker

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Tagged

Algemene kennis

Gangbare naam
Wicker, Tom
Officiële naam
Wicker, Thomas Grey
Pseudoniemen en naamsvarianten
Connolly, Paul (pen name)
Geboortedatum
1926-06-18
Overlijdensdatum
2011-11-25
Geslacht
male
Nationaliteit
USA
Geboorteplaats
Hamlet, North Carolina, USA
Plaats van overlijden
Rochester, Vermont, USA
Opleiding
University of North Carolina (Journalism, 1948)
Beroepen
journalist
Organisaties
The New York Times

Leden

Besprekingen

An early novel by Tom Wicker, long-time columnist for The New York Times. What interested me was to see how much Wicker went on to learn about writing after he published this. It's not bad, but it reminded me of a painting in which everything is detailed and in focus. Just like the eye needs to be guided into an image by effective use of foregrounding, shadow, mistiness, etc., so the mind of a reader. Not everything needs to be described in detail, even if the author is skilled enough to do it.… (meer)
 
Gemarkeerd
HenrySt123 | Jul 19, 2021 |
Some presidents spend their entire careers waiting for their big moment, because, frankly, they never amount to much else. Woodrow Wilson was a good example: A bigoted college professor who managed to back into politics, and won the presidency mostly because the opposition was divided, but still felt that he had the right to be a moral example to the world. For such a man, a biography that is mostly about his presidency is probably in order.

But Eisenhower?

Remember, this is the man who organized the Allied invasions of North Africa, Sicily, and Normandy in World War II. One can debate how well he did so, but he managed to win the war in Europe. That's why he became President, for pity's sake.

And you'd never know it from this book. It spends only about ten pages on Eisenhower's life before the Presidency, and about one sentence on what came after. It is not a presidential biography; it's a history of a presidency.

Admittedly the books in the American Presidents series operate under strict limits: They have to compress their whole contents into about a hundred and fifty pages. It's often a tight squeeze. Something does have to give. So the volume about James A. Garfield, for instance, gives inordinate space to his slow and agonizing death; that's fair, because it's what people remembered. But even that volume had more about the rest of Garfield's life than this book has about Eisenhower's, and again, Eisenhower was only president because he had been a general, and his career as a general informed his career as a president. You can't understand the one without the other. Yet this book asks you to try -- and, frankly, gets rather bogged down as a result. Too much cold war rivalry with Khrushchev mixed with too many loose ends (for example, the book never even tells us what eventually happened to Francis Gary Powers, the U-2 pilot who was lost over the Soviet Union, resulting in an end to nuclear negotiations).

This is a short, readable book that is a useful reminder of a period few now remember. But I just don't think it's the whole story.
… (meer)
½
 
Gemarkeerd
waltzmn | Jul 15, 2020 |
An account of the revolt at the Attica prison in New York in September 1971.
 
Gemarkeerd
LanternLibrary | 1 andere bespreking | Sep 30, 2017 |
worth reading twice.
 
Gemarkeerd
EzyReader | 1 andere bespreking | Mar 3, 2016 |

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Statistieken

Werken
24
Ook door
22
Leden
968
Populariteit
#26,597
Waardering
½ 3.5
Besprekingen
11
ISBNs
46
Talen
1
Favoriet
1

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