An engaging tour of the busy intersection where history, politics, journalism and power converge.
A freelance journalist debuts with an account of the little-known relationship between a powerful journalist and a president.
The author has much on his narrative plate. The social and political history of the early 20th century, the biographies of Roosevelt and Bishop, the story of the Panama Canal—all figure prominently. Bishop, 12 years older that Roosevelt, outlived the bully president by nearly a decade. The author, who is Bishop’s great-grandnephew, begins with the 1919 death of Roosevelt, then devotes some chapters to the lives of his principals before they met, cutting back and forth between them. Bishop, a so-so student at Brown, moved to New York City, where he gradually ascended journalism’s ladder until he was writing popular editorials for the New York Evening Post. Interwoven is the progress of Roosevelt through young manhood and his initial government posts, including his appointment as New York City police commissioner, a job that soon connected him with Bishop. The author writes that there was no magic moment of meeting, but they both realized the other’s value. Though Bishop did not always support Roosevelt’s actions, he did so with enough frequency that when his journalism career was collapsing, he landed a position with the Panama Canal Commission, a position that caused some in Congress to cry cronyism. The author, responding that his ancestor worked hard and did well, quotes generously from the many letters between the two and from secondary sources on Roosevelt, the block quotations from which sometimes make his text look like a term paper.
An engaging tour of the busy intersection where history, politics, journalism and power converge.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-7627-7754-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2011
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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