Concluding with the rise of Franklin Roosevelt, this study is finely focused and fills an important niche in presidential...
A fair-handed, surprisingly sympathetic new appraisal of the much-vilified president who was faced with the nation’s plunge into the Great Depression.
Reading Rappleye’s (Robert Morris: Financier of the American Revolution, 2010, etc.) engaging account of Herbert Hoover’s (1874-1964) one-term presidency, readers may find themselves thinking that maybe the Depression wasn’t really Hoover’s fault after all. Indeed, considering Hoover’s extraordinary managerial skills—he was a self-made businessman, head of the postwar food-aid program Belgian Relief, eight-year secretary of commerce under President Calvin Coolidge—his engineering background, and his reputation as a problem-solver, why couldn’t he devise a way out of national misery? His landslide election against Alfred Smith in 1928 seemed to usher enormous optimism, as the well-intentioned Hoover declared confidently that “we in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land. The poorhouse is vanishing from among us.” Yet the bad news was only just beginning, including the wildly unrestrained Wall Street speculation and the global agricultural recession. The president ultimately seemed to show an indifference to national suffering, rejecting a $60 million drought loan program, which would have “defended the notion of volunteer aid and private relief as America’s core mode of emergency response.” Rappleye valiantly portrays all facets of this conflicted character, who “preached his gospel of recovery until he almost believed it himself” and, as a leader, had some visionary early progressive programs, such as the Federal Farm Board, expansion in public works, and the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. However, increasing unemployment, bank failures, a credit crisis, hunger marchers, and the Bonus Army converging on the capital—as well as the government’s dogged adherence to the “grim logic” of the gold standard—all competed to create Hoover’s “Gethsemane.”
Concluding with the rise of Franklin Roosevelt, this study is finely focused and fills an important niche in presidential scholarship.Pub Date: May 10, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4516-4867-6
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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