by Judith Miller ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 7, 2015
Miller might possess just cause, but one-sided, bitter accounts of her disputes feel unworthy of a talented journalist.
Miller (God Has Ninety-Nine Names: Reporting From a Militant Middle East, 1997, etc.) offers her account of her ignominious departure from the New York Times in 2005 due to her allegedly inaccurate coverage about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Unsurprisingly, the author claims that Times editors, fellow reporters, and various other parties used her as a scapegoat after President George W. Bush and his advisers decided to invade Iraq on the basis of reporting by Miller (as well as various government agency assessments) that the rogue nation posed a danger to the United States. Yes, Miller reveals, she misjudged information provided to her by sources inside and outside Iraq. However, she adds, she did her best to vet her sources in an atmosphere that made separating truth from lies nearly impossible. Along the way to her qualified mea culpa, Miller shares accounts from her four decades of global and domestic journalism. As a memoir of high-stakes journalism, the book is solid. It is especially revealing about why she decided to go to prison for contempt of court rather than reveal a confidential source related to the outing of Valerie Plame, who was secretly employed by the CIA. Prior to her dismissal from the Times, Miller spent 85 days in prison because she felt a professional obligation to honor a promise of source confidentiality. When the author reveals snippets about her personal life, she admirably addresses rumors of romances with powerful men, including a member of Congress. Her occasional references to her late-in-life marriage to book publishing guru Jason Epstein reveal their sometimes-differing viewpoints about domestic life and about reporting risks. Unfortunately, the memoir is marred by frequent score-settling, especially aimed at New York Times editors and publishers.
Miller might possess just cause, but one-sided, bitter accounts of her disputes feel unworthy of a talented journalist.Pub Date: April 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4767-1601-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
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BOOK TO SCREEN
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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