Hickenlooper draws an analogy between brewing and politics (the activist as yeast, the political leader as brewer), but...
Colorado’s high-profile governor submits an unconventional autobiography.
When it comes to political memoirs, a notoriously guarded, agenda-driven genre, readers are not wrong to be wary. What, then, to make of this exquisitely timed publication by a two-term governor of a purple state only months before his party casts about for a vice presidential nominee? Hickenlooper has lived a life sufficiently varied and interesting that his run for office doesn’t occur until past the midpoint of the narrative. Elected Denver’s mayor in 2002, he became the first in 125 years to move from that office to the governorship in 2010. When politics takes over the story, we’re in the familiar, dreary territory taken up with bouquets to supporters and subordinates, tributes to gritty and resilient constituents, electoral obstacles overcome, problems solved, and controversial issues confronted—in Hickenlooper’s case, fracking, same-sex unions, legalizing marijuana, and capital punishment. The author emerges with pretty high marks, but we’re inclined to credit him because of the apparent honesty he brings to his public career. With the help of Potter (Shadows in the Vineyard: The True Story of the Plot to Poison the World’s Greatest Wine, 2014, etc.), who served as the author’s speechwriter, Hickenlooper recounts his troubled boyhood, his peripatetic and protracted academic career—he’s the only Wesleyan student ever to receive “tenure”—his checkered love life, his (largely failed) artistic ambitions and endeavors, his dabbling in real estate, his mostly unsatisfying stint as a geologist, and his wildly successful run as a brewpub entrepreneur. All this entertains wonderfully: the brushes with the famous—Yoko Ono, Phil Donahue, etc.—the colorful anecdotes about the campaign to save “Mile High,” the beer label authored by Kurt Vonnegut, the Quaker ancestor who was also a brewer.
Hickenlooper draws an analogy between brewing and politics (the activist as yeast, the political leader as brewer), but however apt that metaphor, it’s difficult to imagine a more unusual preparation for public life than the one ably recounted here.Pub Date: May 24, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-98167-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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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