An evenhanded, timely biography of a boisterous politician who "personif[ies] a media-focused, celebrity-obsessed,...
A hard-boiled account of the career of Chris Christie, colorful governor and presidential aspirant, "the first bona fide American YouTube politician."
Peabody Award winner Katz knows Christie well. As a print and radio reporter, the author has covered the governor for more than five years; in this capacity, he makes frequent cameo appearances in the book, sometimes as the butt of Christie’s jokes. In this debut, Katz surveys Christie's career—from failed local politician to U.S. Attorney for New Jersey to governor with reportorial swagger and a strong measure of cynicism. As a Republican governor in an overwhelmingly blue state, Christie had to reach accommodations with the local Democratic warlords in order to get anything done; the author permits these understandings to be viewed as tough-minded practical politics or as grimy backroom deals, depending on the reader's inclinations. For much of the book, Katz seems mildly vexed to have to portray a popular Republican governor working closely with the opposition party to achieve more effective and fiscally responsible government than his state had seen in many years. He freely gives Christie his due in this regard while peppering the narrative with fair criticism and occasional lapses into innuendo and snark. Shifting chronologies sometimes make it hard to follow Katz's otherwise crisp narrative, which comes most vividly alive in his presentation of "Bridgegate," the closure of lanes on the George Washington Bridge in September 2013 by rogue Christie appointees to inconvenience the mayor and people of Fort Lee. Written in the present tense, the account of the events and the subsequent investigations races forward with the pulse of a gripping political thriller. Never tied directly to the scandal, Christie nevertheless suffered lasting political damage in its wake, as his unvarnished speaking style and Jersey-tough shtick began to work against him.
An evenhanded, timely biography of a boisterous politician who "personif[ies] a media-focused, celebrity-obsessed, blunt-talking U.S. of A."Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4767-8266-9
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Threshold Editions/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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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