Into the Kennedy aura once more, but brightly.
A gallimaufry of musings on the Kennedy family showcases some classy political writing.
Willis (Mob, p. 1475, etc.) pulls together 21 articles and book excerpts to form a collection centered on Jack, Bobby, and Ted. The aim is to provide revealing glimpses into a family that has struck a deep chord in American life, and although the insights don't necessarily hold any water, much of the writing here is superb. “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” Norman Mailer’s acid deflation of the 1960 Democratic Convention in Los Angeles, reminds us that when it came to political reporting, he could out-Wolfe and out-Thompson them all. An excerpt from Richard Reeves's President Kennedy chillingly recalls the bad advice JFK took from Maxwell Taylor and Walt Rostow concerning Vietnam, and the good advice he ignored from the likes of George Ball. In a portion of The Dark Side of Camelot, Seymour Hersh contributes an uncharacteristically sensitive look at the role JFK’s father played in shaping his personality. There are a couple of gripping airplane disaster stories (Kathleen's death, Ted's near-miss) and a brooding piece from Jack Newfield’s Robert Kennedy: A Memoir about the changes Bobby underwent as his political education transformed him from intolerant authoritarian to a man who identified with all of life's losers. There are also a couple of unexpected pieces: a portrait of the pitiful Marina Oswald from Norman Mailer’s Oswald’s Tale and “The Exner File,” historian Michael O'Brien’s examination of Jack's mob connections as mediated through girlfriend Judith Exner. “The Holy Family,” Gore Vidal's 1967 essay on the fraudulence of the Kennedy mystique, shows Jack outmaneuvered by Khrushchev and made to look ludicrous by the Bay of Pigs fiasco, trumped on all his social legislation by a truculent congress. But if there was one thing the Kennedys excelled at, it was projecting an image; they continue to cast it long after death.
Into the Kennedy aura once more, but brightly.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-56025-333-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2001
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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