by Barney Frank ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2015
Much more entertaining than most political memoirs, Frank’s story isn’t just revealing; it may be the most fun you can have...
Now that the fiery, occasionally dyspeptic congressman has left office, he lets the air out in a memoir that feels like it’s just the thing the long-serving politician has wanted to publish.
Frank tracks the nuances of two intriguing movements during his more than four decades in public life. When he was a novice politician in the late 1960s, the author had to hide his homosexuality, although nowadays—in a trend that owes some of its success to Frank’s becoming the first member of Congress to come out of the closet in 1987—same-sex marriage is increasingly prevalent. But while some personal freedoms are more possible now than when Frank entered politics, the concept that government can actually help citizens is decidedly on the wane. Nonetheless, the author has never stopped fighting the battle to pillory the idea that big government is inherently problematic. He writes movingly about issues of public housing and fairness that he has espoused throughout his career, but he also proves to be a barbed, exacting, witty thinker. On the topic of the “competent, uncharismatic” George Bush’s now infamous “read my lips: no new taxes” mishap, Frank writes, “[s]emantically, the phrase bothered me because it is illogical—you tell people to read your lips when they cannot hear you, and this does not apply when you are speaking to them through a microphone.” In addition to his personal story, parts of the book read like a manual for young politicians: “I think it is both legitimate and politically helpful to make my ideological opponents look not just wrong but also foolish, especially if I can use humor to do it.”
Much more entertaining than most political memoirs, Frank’s story isn’t just revealing; it may be the most fun you can have reading about the United States Congress.Pub Date: March 17, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-374-28030-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2015
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PROFILES
by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
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SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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