Hardball host Matthews (Life's a Campaign: What Politics Has Taught Me About Friendship, Rivalry, Reputation, and Success, 2007, etc.) blends tributes and chastisement in this highly personal account of John F. Kennedy’s career.
The author begins with his earliest memory of JFK—his failed 1956 attempt to gain the vice-president spot with Adlai Stevenson. From a Republican family, Matthews gradually moved the other way, and JFK was a major factor. Throughout the narrative, the author combines political biography with personal reflection. Repeatedly, he narrates a key event in JFK’s career (e.g., the Bay of Pigs debacle), and then raises questions about why the president behaved as he did. Matthews praises Kennedy’s heroism during World War II, his determination to excel despite his medical conditions and his recognition of the moral aspects of politics. The excerpt Matthews includes from a JFK civil-rights speech delivered after the crisis at the University of Alabama remains stirring today. The author also lauds JFK for his ability to turn from his strong-willed father, his devotion to old friends, his speaking and debating skills and his resolution in the face of the dire threats issued by the Soviets. Despite his obvious emotional attachment to JFK, Matthews does not neglect his negative character traits. He reminds us that Kennedy was not a devoted husband—not just because of his serial infidelities but also in his casual, even cruel, treatment of his wife—and he questions JFK’s support of Sen. Joseph McCarthy and his appointment of his own brother Robert as Attorney General—“sheer, unadulterated nepotism,” writes the author. Matthews also recognizes that the Kennedy charm lay on a hard foundation of political savvy, even ruthlessness. Matthews’ admiration and gratitude for JFK trump his disapprobation.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4516-3508-9
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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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