More of the same from the outspoken Southerner.
More chuckly preaching from the former Arkansas governor and Fox News weekly show host.
Having run for president in 2008 and lost the Republican nomination, Huckabee (Dear Chandler, Dear Scarlett: A Grandfather's Thoughts on Faith, Family, and the Things that Matter Most, 2012, etc.) sounds like he is going to try again, and he presents his clear delineation in ideology between the views of “Bubble-ville” (the “nerve centers” of New York, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles) and “Bubba-ville”—the rest of the country. While residents of the former are among his best friends, of course, even if they hate guns, eat kale and embrace gay marriage, the latter group includes his homegrown buddies, those who cherish their guns for hunting and self-defense, attend church and find Miley Cyrus’ contortions shocking. In the name of “decency,” Huckabee sees the country going down the tubes with the politically correct thought police stifling free expression (e.g., “illegal aliens” have become nonoffensive “dreamers”), former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg trying to take away the Big Gulp, National Security Agency revelations that demonstrate how we are becoming more like China in terms of surveillance and rights’ suppression (while China is becoming more like us in terms of capitalist acquisition), TSA officials patting down toddlers in airports, and the general Democrat-driven overloading of regulation and taxation that is, for example, sending California’s small-business owners to Texas. While the author is fond of declaring that people just want to be left alone, he has to admit that certain members of his own party are ruining it for the rest of them—e.g., conservatives attacking other conservatives for not being conservative enough. Huckabee also skewers the Republicans who supported the TARP bailout of banks and offers a populist, bottom-up economic approach to empowering the regular, God-centered folk.
More of the same from the outspoken Southerner.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-06099-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2014
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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