Brookhiser elegantly undermines his subjects even as he sympathetically records their importance as a crucial link between...
A concise history of four famous men from the house of Adams.
John (1735–1826), John Quincy (1767–1848), Charles Francis (1807–86), and Henry (1838–1918) were a prickly bunch who always maintained their sense of self-importance, even after they failed to realize their goals and the family started its long slump into obscurity. Their other shared trait, after all, was contrariness. John was in favor of a kingly presidency, but he despaired of George Washington’s regal air even as he sought but failed to acquire it. Historian and journalist Brookhiser (Alexander Hamilton, American, 1999, etc.) calls John the first loser in American presidential history, alienating so many during his single term that he couldn’t get re-elected. John Quincy was a strident enemy of slavery not because he wanted to free slaves but because he believed that their masters wanted to lord it over free men as well. Charles Francis despised partisanship, yet he would have gotten nowhere if he hadn’t hooked up with William Seward, who as Secretary of State made him ambassador to England. And Henry, who found post–Civil War politics vulgar, nonetheless moved to Washington and became a political journalist. Brookhiser, an admirer of WASP culture, is fascinated by the Adamses’ tendency to play out in the public arena exploits that were really directed toward family members. John wanted to impress Samuel Adams. John Quincy had to impress his father. The work Charles Francis most appreciated was the editing of his father’s diaries. And Henry could breathe a sigh of relief only after he wrote “Mont Saint Michel and Chartres” as a testament to his family’s genius. One wishes that the female members of the tribe had received some attention here. They must have been impressive characters, or no Adams would have married them in the first place.
Brookhiser elegantly undermines his subjects even as he sympathetically records their importance as a crucial link between Americans of several generations and their national past.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-684-86881-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2001
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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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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