A brief study of the medical and political coverups that prevented the American people from learning that in 1944 they had reelected a president who was dying, from the prolific writer/editor who has created something of a sub-genre of history- -sick presidents (Ill Advised: Presidential Health and Public Trust, 1992, etc.). Ferrell leaves little doubt that by early 1944 Roosevelt was indeed dying. Examined by a leading heart specialist of the time, Dr. Howard G. Bruenn, on March 28, 1944, the president was diagnosed as having severe heart disease. Ferrell questions why such a serious condition wasn't detected earlier and places the blame clearly on the president's primary physician, Vice Adm. Ross McIntire, surgeon general of the US Navy. McIntire, a political appointee, was quite simply an incompetent doctor who over the years examined the president in only the most cursory ways. Still, the president was not the best of patients. He seemed to believe he could will away his maladies and didn't want to know the true condition of his health. FDR or his press secretary, Steve Early, even had J. Edgar Hoover send agents to Bethesda Naval Hospital to quash gossip among the doctors there as to the state of the president's health. Roosevelt, in his last year, worked four hours a day at most, at a time when WW II was approaching its final stages. Ferrell contends that if Roosevelt had been working at full capacity, the course of the war in the Pacific might have been quite different, China might not have become Communist, the Korean War might not have happened, and Nixon might not have resigned. This pushes historical speculation too far and contrasts poorly with the carefully researched narrative of FDR's last days, which is the bulk of the book. Though slight, this volume, based on much previously unavailable documentation, does provide an intimate glimpse of the last days of one of America's greatest presidents. (45 illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: March 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-8262-1171-2
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Univ. of Missouri
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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