Whether his subjects are viewed as champions or apostates, Oppenheimer's insightful narrative should inspire some...
"A political identity is always a negotiation, between what it demands and who we are," asserts freelance journalist Oppenheimer as he explores "the negotiation of specific left-wing identities…and how those negotiations fell apart."
In this confident debut, the author examines the processes by which six prominent figures—Whittaker Chambers, James Burnham, Ronald Reagan, Norman Podhoretz, David Horowitz, and Christopher Hitchens—came to alter their political views to move from being devotees of the left (arguably excepting Reagan) to advocates for conservatism (arguably excepting Hitchens). Oppenheimer’s purpose is not to suggest some unifying principle behind his subjects' metamorphoses or to evaluate the views of either the right or the left but rather to explore the nature and origins of personal political belief. He tells these individuals' stories because "it's during the period of political transition…that the contingency and complexity of belief become most visible." The author contends that we can learn something of value "about the world and ourselves by observing that process with empathy and respect," in particular a degree of humility about our own apparently deeply held political principles. On one level, the book is a narrative of six ideological odysseys, driven by shifting leftist orthodoxies unique to their times and by personal, emotional issues unique to the individual. The events span the period from the Stalinist 1930s through the New Left to the post–9/11 left of today—"a history of the American Left in the Twentieth Century"—and Oppenheimer ably reveals each era's characteristics, contradictions, and challenges to intelligent adherents. The author excels in portraying the personal torments and costs to his subjects in their transitional struggles, including losses of self-confidence, friendships, and professional relations. The interplay between large historical movements and personal anguish is well-balanced and skillfully handled throughout.
Whether his subjects are viewed as champions or apostates, Oppenheimer's insightful narrative should inspire some soul-searching among political believers of every stripe.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4165-8970-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015
PROFILES
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
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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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