An appealing tasting menu for the banquet that is Lincoln.
Essays crafted from C-SPAN interviews of 55 writers on Lincoln.
As the 200th anniversary of Lincoln’s birth approaches, this collection serves as a useful introduction to the startling depth of the Lincoln discussion among scholars during the past decade and a half. Many of the contributors—e.g., Allen C. Guelzo, David Herbert Donald, Stephen B. Oates, Harold Holzer, James M. McPherson, Mark Neely Jr.—are either Lincoln or Civil War–era specialists. Others are notable historians who have written important Lincoln-centered books—e.g., Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, Jay Winik’s April 1865: The Month That Saved America, Garry Wills’s Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America. These scholars offer illuminating insights, all more gracefully explained and profitably explored in the books that prompted the conversations captured here, as Lamb (Booknotes: Life Stories: Notable Biographers on the People Who Shaped Our World, 1999, etc.) and C-SPAN president Swain readily acknowledge. The collection’s chief delight, particularly for readers already well-versed in Lincolniana, lies in the odd-angle assessments contributed by historians better known for their work apart from Lincoln, such as Merrill D. Peterson, Gordon S. Wood, Robert Remini, Richard Norton Smith, David Reynolds and H.W. Brands, or in the nuggets offered by observers from different disciplines such as art, economics, criticism and journalism. The essays are roughly divided into groups centering on Lincoln’s path to the White House, his character, his performance as a wartime president and his iconic historical status. The editors’ big-tent presentation makes room for dissenting voices from “the church of Lincoln”—the sometimes self-serving scholarly “industry” that’s grown up around the 16th president—and they allow Lincoln to speak for himself, reprinting seven of his speeches and an excerpt from the Charleston debate with Stephen Douglas. Mini-biographies of the contributors serve both as a tribute to the variety and distinction of the assembled voices and as a helpful guide for those eager to learn more.
An appealing tasting menu for the banquet that is Lincoln.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-58648-676-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2008
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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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