Readers on this side of the pond who are puzzled by the impassioned esteem and disdain in which Thatcher is held in Britain...
Britain’s storied Iron Lady comes in for a largely positive but not uncritical reassessment from a Conservative Member of Parliament.
Kwarteng (War and Gold: A Five-Hundred-Year History of Empires, Adventures, and Debt, 2014, etc.), who represents the historically conservative constituency of Spelthorne, may offend one or two die-hard admirers of Margaret Thatcher (1925-2013) with his careful qualifications: yes, she was a true-blue scourger of socialism and the welfare state, but she was defined by a largely negative program of what she was against. Yes, she had strongly held beliefs and remained true to her cause, but she was doctrinaire and an ideologue. More than anything else, she had an “almost preternatural ability to divide opinion,” such that few were undecided or neutral on the matter of Margaret Thatcher. Much of Kwarteng’s look at the end of Thatcher’s first term in office is a balanced assessment. She was, more than any other prime minister in modern British history, open to discussion and even dissent on the part of her Cabinet, and she thrived on confrontation and debate—“provided, of course, that she prevailed.” Occasionally, the author gives away more than he intends to: Thatcher, he writes, was a radical from the beginning, and her “quasi-revolutionary fervor” was deeply shocking to the established order on both left and right. One senses mild disapproval though not disavowal on Kwarteng’s part as he steers the narrative through purges of that Cabinet and the government, union-busting and strike-breaking, dismantling of various parts of the social safety net, and neo-imperialist adventuring—all of which took place in the last part of 1982 and first part of 1983, when Thatcher would profoundly remake the Conservative Party and be rewarded for it with a sweeping re-election victory.
Readers on this side of the pond who are puzzled by the impassioned esteem and disdain in which Thatcher is held in Britain will find much of value in this short but illuminating study.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-61039-562-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2015
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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