If as the author claims, ``friendship is distinctly underdeveloped'' as a field of study, this weak account of the relationship between David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill is unlikely to promote the concept. It is a pity, because Rintala (Western European Politics/Boston College) has some potentially intriguing material. British politics in the 20th century produced no more impressive figures than Lloyd George, leader of the Liberal Party and prime minister during WW I, and Churchill. Though one was born in relatively humble circumstances in Wales, and the other in Blenheim Castle, they had a surprising amount in common and their friendship lasted for 40 years. Neither went to university; both were adventurers; both were great orators; both led their country in great wars; both escaped the more dire consequences of misjudgment- -in each case, partly through the friendship of the other. The Marconi scandal, an imprudent investment in shares in the American Marconi Company while he was chancellor of the exchequer, might have brought Lloyd George down but for Churchill's help. Lloyd George brought Churchill into his cabinet after the disaster at Gallipoli, for which the latter was blamed by many Conservatives. Unfortunately, Rintala's account is permeated with the obvious (``Hatred is certainly present in politics, but people act out of love, as well''); with error (``Baldwin also hated Churchill''—in fact Stanley Baldwin made Churchill chancellor of the exchequer in the 1920s when he was at the nadir of his fortunes); with obscurity (``Even if a particular friendship were angelic, much humility, as C.S. Lewis saw, is needed if one is to eat the bread of angels without risk''); with gratuitous tastelessness (``There is no evidence that Lloyd George and Churchill had in any respect a sexual relationship with each other''); and with judgments of staggering incomprehension (``[Churchill] loved war more than he loved Lloyd George''). This book, unlike the friendship it chronicles, can't be saved.
Pub Date: March 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-56833-031-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1995
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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