A knowledgeable but fairly tedious assessment of the trajectory of Lincoln’s early career.
The story of Lincoln’s two-year stint in Congress.
There might be a reason why so few books about Lincoln dwell on his brief spell as an Illinois congressman, from 1847 to 1849—the details are mostly dull. To his credit, attorney and political strategist DeRose (Founding Rivals: Madison vs. Monroe, The Bill of Rights, and the Election that Saved a Nation, 2011) injects some energy into the political minutiae, managing to sound a few bright, telling moments within the fight over the Mexican War, slavery and Whig jockeying that portended the later, great president. Lincoln was just beginning to test the political waters as a successful Springfield lawyer and leader of the Illinois Whig party when he decided to run for Congress in his mid-30s. Already known for his good nature and entertaining storytelling, he was also deeply ambitious and committed to helping the Whigs gain power. By cannily gaining support for his county base by taking on new law partner William Herndon, as well as having married (albeit reluctantly) into “what passed for Illinois aristocracy” in the person of Mary Todd, Lincoln was learning the game of politics, handily defeating his Democratic opponent in 1846. In Washington, Lincoln and his family stayed at Sprigg’s boardinghouse, the so-called “Abolition House,” mingling with kingpins and becoming a member of the minority Whig congressional caucus. Lincoln distinguished himself by his key advocacy for the Whig candidate for president, Gen. Zachary Taylor, and by his stance against the war and against the spread of slavery in Oregon. It was an important time of making political connections and shaking out the “hayseed in his hair.”
A knowledgeable but fairly tedious assessment of the trajectory of Lincoln’s early career.Pub Date: Jan. 29, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4516-9514-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Threshold Editions/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2013
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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