Though Love admits to his share of mistakes, both he and the president he served emerge from this memoir as admirable and...
A memoir in which the author recounts his years as personal aide and “bodyman” for Barack Obama.
After Obama’s election, he told the parents of the author, who had been working with him since the Senate, that Love was “like a son” to the Obamas. Nothing in the book will make the White House consider the author less like family. Love dishes no dirt and not much in the way of politics, but he ably reflects the human dimension of the president whose former aide plainly still admires him, and it also suggests what a tumultuous transition it can be for an outsider to find himself immersed in Washington, D.C., without much sense of the responsibilities or expectations accompanying his new job. “What I didn’t have was a job description,” Love remembers of joining the senator’s staff. “To this day I still haven’t been able to track it down, because there never was one. Each bodyman job is unique to the principal the PA is working for. Every boss is peculiar.” Not that Obama is particularly peculiar—he’s very competitive, doesn’t suffer fools gladly and prefers healthy food that isn’t too messy to eat on the run—but the two men had to feel each other out and form a bond. Basketball provided a common denominator since Love had been captain of (though never a star for) the Duke basketball team, where the mentorship he received from coach Mike Krzyzewski prepared him well for the responsibilities of being a team player for Obama. They had also both been perceived as “the black guy who acted white,” reinforcing bonds of identification despite a significant difference in age.
Though Love admits to his share of mistakes, both he and the president he served emerge from this memoir as admirable and likable.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4767-6334-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 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
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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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