An engaging overview of the president’s early political education.
Journalist McClelland (The Third Coast: Sailors, Strippers, Fishermen, Folksingers, Long-Haired Ojibway Painters, and God-Save-the-Queen Monarchists of the Great Lakes, 2008, etc.) looks at the effect of President Obama’s years in Chicago.
Obama first came to Chicago in 1985 as a recent Columbia University graduate to work as a community organizer in the housing projects on Chicago’s South Side. After a three-year absence to attend Harvard Law School, he went on to spend his entire political career in Chicago—first as an Illinois state senator, then as Illinois’s junior U.S. Senator—before becoming president. McClelland, a former staff writer for the Chicago Reader, reported on Obama during his time in the city, and he provides a vivid portrait of Chicago and its politics—from the poor Altgeld Gardens housing projects, where Obama directed the Developing Communities Project as an organizer, to the nearby affluent academic neighborhood of Hyde Park, where he taught as a law professor at the University of Chicago. The city’s rough-and-tumble political atmosphere toughened Obama as a legislator and honed his skill at making important political alliances. He also got an education in bare-knuckle political tactics, knocking rivals out of his initial state senate race by aggressively challenging voter petitions. Through legislation, he worked to remedy the city’s infamous political corruption. His failed run for a seat in the U.S. Congress in 2000 made him rethink his staid and professorial public demeanor, transforming him into a stunningly charismatic speechmaker. Significantly, he was also forced to confront the complex politics of race in a city with the largest population of African-Americans in the United States—some of whom questioned the authenticity of the mixed-race Obama’s “blackness.” While McClelland perhaps overstates the importance of Chicago on the national political stage—“[O]nly in Chicago could a black man become president of the United States”—he makes a convincing case that President Obama’s experiences in his adopted city shaped him profoundly and helped make him the seasoned and formidable politician he is today.
An engaging overview of the president’s early political education.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-60819-060-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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