For students of the Revolutionary era, the author delivers a useful biography of a significant player in the birth pangs of...
A descendant of little-known Founding Father Thomas McKean (1734-1817) places him “in the context of his times.”
The director of policy planning at the Department of State and former staff director for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, David McKean (Tommy the Cork: Washington's Ultimate Insider from Roosevelt to Reagan, 2003, etc.) knows his politics and explains the difficulties encountered in uniting the widely varied states during the Colonial period. By the time Thomas McKean was 20, he had established himself as one of the hardest-working and most effective lawyers in New Castle, the capital of the lower counties of Pennsylvania. From there, the larger stage of Philadelphia called, offering culture, economics, and plenty of opportunities for an ambitious lawyer. McKean sat on every important commission of those early years, and the author praises his “pragmatism and political dexterity.” Establishing Pennsylvania’s new constitution led him to the radical small farmers and tradesmen in the West, who wanted to eliminate the property requirement, but McKean had no use for anyone who wasn’t of the professional trades—i.e., lawyers and doctors. He felt that only upper-class citizens could effectively run the country. The list of his accomplishments is long: he was a signer of the Declaration of Independence, a three-term governor of Pennsylvania, and the president of the Continental Congress. Most important was his devotion to the rule of law. His Supreme Court in Pennsylvania was more powerful than the newly established U.S. Court. He fought to establish equity between the three arms of government and served in all three. He was a powerful man living in the right time and place. At the same time, he was arrogant, vain, and overbearing, and he is credited with the beginnings of the “spoil” system of patronage and nepotism in America. His story has been long in coming and worth the wait.
For students of the Revolutionary era, the author delivers a useful biography of a significant player in the birth pangs of the new nation.Pub Date: May 10, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-61039-221-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
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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