Although more a journalist than a historian, Collins has done her homework and written a lively, opinionated portrait of...
This splendid series of slim biographies nears completion with a satisfying life of our ninth and least important president.
New York Times columnist Collins (When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present, 2009) admits that Harrison (1773–1841) accomplished little before dying a month after inauguration. His career peaked nearly 30 years earlier, but he was not the first politician to milk earlier triumphs. The son of a prosperous Virginia planter, he served several years in the Army before using family influence to win appointment as Indiana Territory governor in 1800, where his job was to encourage white settlement and remove Indians. He won a national reputation after the 1811 Battle of Tippecanoe, a bloody skirmish in which far more whites than Indians died. As a general in the War of 1812, he won the Battle of the Thames in Canada, another glorified skirmish that was acclaimed because the widely feared Indian leader, Tecumseh, was killed. Resigning in 1814, Harrison retired to his Ohio estate and a mediocre political career, winning some offices, losing others. He was the first Whig candidate for president in 1836 and lost, but won in the famously lowbrow “Tippecanoe and Tyler, too” 1840 campaign, which began the American tradition (unique among democracies) of candidates boasting that they are no smarter than the electorate and that this ordinariness makes them fit to lead the nation.
Although more a journalist than a historian, Collins has done her homework and written a lively, opinionated portrait of early-19th-century America and the modestly talented general who briefly became president.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9118-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2011
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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